Institutions, ethnicity, and political mobilization in South Africa

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INSTITUTIONS, ETHNICITY, AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

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Institutions, Ethnicity, and Political Mobilization in South Africa Jessica Piombo

INSTITUTIONS, ETHNICITY, AND POLITICAL MOBILIZATION IN SOUTH AFRICA

Copyright © Jessica Piombo, 2009. All rights reserved. First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–61734–6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: July 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

To Marissa, Juliana, Christopher, and Elena. The future is what you make of it.


Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations

xv

1 Introduction: Ethnic Mobilization during Democratization

1

2 Shaping Strategies of Political Mobilization

21

3

South Africa’s Political Institutions and Social Divisions

37

4

Electoral Politics in South Africa, 1994–2004

63

5

The African National Congress: Playing to Win

79

6

The New National Party: Transforming into Irrelevance

103

7

From Democratic Party to Democratic Alliance: Mobilizing Minority Power?

125

The Inkatha Freedom Party: Turning away from Ethnic Power

143

8

9 Conclusion: The Contingent Nature of Political Mobilization

163

Notes

183

Bibliography

215

Index

247


List of Illustrations

Figure 3.1

Racial Composition of Workforce

58

Tables 3.1 and 3.1a Racial and Ethnolinguistic Groups in South Africa 3.2 Self-Identification of South Africans 3.3 Self-Identification within Racial Groups 4.1 National Election Results, 1994–2004 9.1 Mobilization Strategy Incentive Matrix

48 54 55 65 177


Acknowledgments

T

his book is the product of a journey that began over ten years ago, and in that time many people and institutions have helped the project unfold to its completion. I owe a debt of gratitude to each and every one of them. This book would not exist at all had I not gained a mentor in Harvey Glickman at Haverford College. During the long years of graduate study at MIT, Frederic C. Schaffer, Chappell Lawson, and Joshua Cohen all helped to remind me of the forest when I focused on the trees. Each distinctly shaped the early work out of which this project has grown. Andrew Reynolds lent his expertise on constitutional and electoral engineering, and Kanchan Chandra helped met to refine the analytical focus on ethnic mobilization. In the project’s final stages, Vali Nasr, Kent Eaton, and Jeanne Giraldo provided sage advice about how to frame the book so that its analysis reaches beyond the prism of South African politics. Many different organizations supported the field research on which this project is based. Grants for field research were provided by the MIT Department of Political Science, the National Science Foundation (Graduate Research Traineeship in Democratization and a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant [award no. 9818675]), the Irving Louis Horowitz Foundation for Social Policy, and the Caroll L. Wilson awards program at MIT. The Naval Postgraduate School provided additional support for supplemental research and the time to write up the final product. This project is rooted in detailed fieldwork in South Africa that was conducted over the course of five years. I spent all of 1999 and half of 2000 observing and participating in the electoral process for national, provincial, and local elections. My research sites were located in Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town; at each of these locations I visited provincial offices of the Independent Electoral Commission, observed election rallies and political meetings, and interviewed party officials. During that time, I also worked with local think thanks,

xii

ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

universities, and electoral monitoring organizations. I offer humble thanks for the support of the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), which shared its offices in Pretoria and Cape Town during the first two years of this research process. Thank you to my friends and colleagues Robert Mattes, Sean Jacobs, Cherrel Africa, Tanya Chanker, Ebrahim Fakir, and Matthew de Gale. Special thanks go to Bob, collaborator, coauthor, and sponsor. The (then) University of Durban-Westville (now the University of KwaZulu-Natal, Westville Campus), hosted me while conducting research in Durban in 1999. Adam Habib and Sanusha Naidu facilitated my work during that time, and greatly nuanced my understanding of class and gender politics in South Africa. In the final years of fieldwork, the Centre for Social Science Research at the University of Cape Town provided a working environment that offered intellectual diversity and expert administrative support. They hosted a series of workshops on the 2004 elections that brought together leading South African analysts to debate the process. Jeremy Seekings, Tom Lodge, Robert Mattes, Susan Booysen, Steven Friedman, Collette Schulz-Herzenberg, and Gavin Davis were especially active members in this excellent group of collaborators. These insights, collected in an edited volume published in 2005, directly contributed to this project. Liz Nijzink, a good colleague and friend, not only coedited that volume, but also provided a second home during field research in 2003 and 2004. In the Western Cape, I worked with the Provincial Monitoring Forum, a local election monitoring organization, in 1999, 2000, and 2004. That experience graced me with a diverse group of friends and the ability to enter communities, locations, and witness electoral events across various language, color, ethnic, and class divides. Since that time, several of these friends have lost battles with AIDS-related diseases. Hamba kahle. I wish to thank all my other friends and colleagues in South Africa who are too numerous to mention here, all of whom made the times that I spent in South Africa some of the most educational and exciting experiences of my life. I learned many of the nuances of South African culture and lived experience, ethnic hierarchies, racial dynamics and debates, and political nuances from them. At MIT, many colleagues helped to develop the ideas that later became this book. David Art, Rachel Gisselquist, Brett Kubicek, Sarah Lischer, Sara Jane McCaffrey, Daniel Metz, Marcela Natalicchio, Jeremy Pressman, Drew Tagliabue, and Cory Welt all contributed to the project at an early stage. I am grateful for their friendship, assistance, criticism, creative ideas, and camaraderie. As I completed this

ACK NOW LEDGMENT S

xiii

book Robert Weiner, Michael Malley, and Anne Marie Baylouny read drafts and contributed unique perspectives on how to situate the work. Elizabeth Robinson and Trisha Bury helped the final editing of the book; their keen eyes rooted out innumerable typos and awkward turns of phrase. Shaheen Mozaffar has contributed his thoughts on the project from its earliest days to the final analysis, and I owe heartfelt thanks for his insight and guidance at key junctures. Finally, I would like to thank my family: my parents, Joseph and Theresa, my sister Tracy and brother Joseph, and the nieces and nephew who constantly reminded me that there is life beyond “the book.” Without them, this endeavor would not have been possible. They watched me travel to a distant country without crippling me with their fears and have supported all the twists and turns that have gotten my career and this book to where it is today. To all the people whom I have inadvertently left out of this note, thank you. Any remaining errors in the work and analysis remain, of course, entirely my own.


List of Abbreviations

ACDP AEB ANC AZAPO BC BCM CA CONTR ALESA COSATU DA DP EISA FA FF FPTP GEAR GNU Idasa IEC ID IFP KZN MDM MEC MF MK MP MPL NA NCOP

African Christian Democratic Party Afrikaner EenheidsBeweging Party African National Party Azanian People’s Organization Black Consciousness Black Consciousness Movement Constituent Assembly Congress of Traditional Leaders of South Africa Congress of South African Trade Unions Democratic Alliance Democratic Party (Democrats) Electoral Institute of Southern Africa Federal Alliance Freedom Front First Past the Post (electoral system) Growth, Employment, and Redistribution Government of National Unity Institute for Democracy in South Africa Independent Electoral Commission Independent Democrats Inkatha Freedom Party (Inkatha) KwaZulu-Natal (province) Mass Democratic Movement Minister of Executive Committee (provincial cabinet members) Minority Front Umkhonto we Sizwe Member of Parliament Member of Provincial Legislature National Assembly National Council of Provinces

xvi

NNP NP PAC PR RDP SACP SACTU SANCO SANDF TEC UCDP UDF UDM WC

L I S T O F A B B R E V I AT I O N S

New National Party (New NP) National Party (Nats, Nationalists) Pan Africanist Congress Proportional Representation (electoral system) Reconstruction and Development Programme South African Communist Party South African Congress of Trade Unions South African National Civics Organization South African National Defence Force Transitional Executive Council United Christian Democratic Front United Democratic Front United Democratic Movement Western Cape

Chapter 1

Introduction: Ethnic Mobilization during Democratization

Ethnic

violence after political transition has characterized the Balkans, Indonesia, post-Saddam Iraq, Russia, and a multitude of other countries. Yet not all multiethnic liberalizing states have experienced ethnic conflict. Some, like Kenya, experienced a relatively peaceful transition from one ruler to another, and developed ethnic violence only after the country was well past the “transitional” phase. Other multiethnic countries such as post-1999 Nigeria and South Africa seem to have avoided all indications of politicized ethnicity and the attendant conflict well into the consolidation phase. These instances of ethnic peace during democratization stand against the emerging conventional wisdom that periods of political opening create seemingly irresistible opportunities to mobilize ethnic constituencies into political blocks, which then escalate into violence. South Africa, despite being notable for a history of politicized race and ethnicity and also for an expectation that ethnic violence would follow the transition in 1994, did not experience widespread ethnic violence with democratization. Since 1994, South Africa has remained a stable country. It has conducted over a decade of increasingly peaceful elections at all tiers of power (national, provincial, and local), and the degree of politically mobilized ethnicity has been on the decrease. The ruling party has avoided falling into the interethnic factional struggles that ripped apart other African liberation movements during the 1960s, ’70s and ’90s. Instead of fragmenting, during the first decade of democracy the ruling African National Congress (ANC) increased its hold on power; ethnic political parties decreased in number and importance; and neither ethnicity nor race emerged as a major mobilizing tool in the political arena.1 This

2

I N S T I T U T I O N S , E T H N I C I T Y, A N D P O L I T I C A L M O B I L I Z AT I O N

marked absence of divisive ethnic and racial politics sets South Africa apart from many other new democracies. The stability of postapartheid South Africa is remarkable first because of the prominent expectation that the country would experience ethnic mobilization and conflict once the controls of the apartheid regime were dismantled. As the apartheid era drew to a close, many analysts had predicted that the broad church of the ANC would splinter along ethnic lines once in power, which would then open up the political arena to ethnic mobilization and potentially ethnic violence.2 After all, the same had just happened to the Zambian Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD) in the mid-1990s after it wrested power from the one-party regime of the United National Independence Party (UNIP). The MMD disintegrated into rival ethnic blocks within five years after political transition in 1991. Since 2006 the ANC has developed internal divisions that could threaten party unity, though these revolve around personal rivalries between key party leaders and a long-standing tension between populist and elitist tendencies, rather than ethnic divisions. Second, South Africa’s ethnic latency is remarkable among African countries, especially given the record set by the newly independent states in the 1960s and ’70s. During the initial decolonization period, the search to contain ethnic, regional, and religious mobilization led many rulers to force their countries into de jure single party or military rule.3 In most of the countries that did not legislate single-party systems, political parties developed along ethnic, religious, and regional lines (which in many cases also reinforced one another, as in Nigeria, Cameroon, Sudan, and Angola). South Africa also stands out against the ethnification of politics in transitioning countries in Southern Africa in the 1990s and 2000s, such as Namibia, Zimbabwe, Angola, and Malawi. Of the major Southern African countries, only Mozambique shows a similar resistance to politicized ethnicity in a multiethnic context. Finally, the absence of politicized ethnicity and ethnic violence in South Africa is notable in light of the global record and the post–cold war rise in intrastate conflicts around the world. Many have studied the processes by which democratic transitions create openings for ethnic violence, as new opportunities for contestation provide incentives for ethnic entrepreneurs to perpetuate or even create conflict, often along ethnic lines.4 Whether ethnic mobilization takes the form of political competition or political violence, playing the ethnic card is seen as one of the most prevalent characteristics of politics in new democracies around the world.

E T H N I C M O B I L I Z AT I O N D U R I N G D E M O C R AT I Z AT I O N

3

Why has South Africa, unlike other transitioning countries, not experienced divisive ethnic mobilization, which is a necessary condition that can then lead to ethnic conflict and even civil war? The central proposition advanced in this work is that elites choose whether or not to mobilize ethnic groups on the basis of the expected payoff of such a strategy. Political actors will mobilize social groups—regional, ethnic, interest, confessional, and so on—depending on the number of votes each group can potentially deliver. Ethnic mobilization is most likely when elites consider it a winning strategy. Where politicians and political parties seek national power, they must craft electoral support coalitions that are large enough to win significant shares of the national vote. Where they seek localized power, smaller coalitions can suffice. Therefore, the relative size and combinability of various social divisions is a critical factor in this process of democratization without ethnic mobilization. Political institutions set both the tier of political competition and the electoral formulas to win seats, while the social divisions in the country set a menu of potential support blocs. The answer offered in this volume thus rests on two sets of factors that interact with each other to shape the choices made by political actors. The first of these, political institutions, either centralizes or distributes power, while the second, the size and combinability of social groups, is the terrain from which politicians seek to generate electoral support. When political institutions centralize power, political actors cultivate electoral coalitions of national importance, and where power is distributed, they seek more localized support blocs. If one or a few ethnic groups are capable of delivering enough votes to help win office at a specific tier of power (local, regional, or national), political agents are likely to mobilize the ethnic group. Where ethnic groups are too small to help an agent gain access to power, the agent is likely to pursue other strategies to gain political office. South Africa has not experienced ethnic conflict because in this highly centralized political system populated by small ethnic groups, mobilizing ethnicity has not proven electorally rewarding. No single ethnic group is large enough to create a winning electoral coalition sufficient to guarantee a national presence, and therefore politicians have turned away from mobilizing ethnically exclusive support blocs. Ethnic groups in South Africa are important organizers of social life and are a fundamental part of people’s personal identities, but ethnicity has remained latent in the political realm. Parties have instead turned to a variety of multiracial, nonracial and minoritybased strategies to craft electoral coalitions of sufficient size to gain

4


significant representation in the national parliament. No single axis of competition—racial, class, or ethnic—has come to define South African politics, and this fluidity has prevented the generation of the divisive and exclusionary politics that destabilized many other transitional polities in this same time period. Ethnic Mobilization during Periods of Political Transition To make clear the terms used in this book before proceeding further, the concept of political opening refers to a varied set of processes that modify and expand access to power. Some political openings constitute a simple liberalization of the political process, such as removing bans on political organization and civil associations, and fostering more participation without renegotiating the basic structures of power. Other political openings constitute broad-based regime change and formal political transition, in which fundamental aspects of a state’s structure are renegotiated. Processes of democratization constitute a subset of political transitions and political opening, in which the formal rules of the game are broadened to include the participation of the entire citizenry and to allow for free contestation for power.5 Ethnicity refers to a form of social identity defined by ascriptive characteristics, such as race, language, tribe, caste, or religion.6 Ethnic groups are considered to have a common set of cultural traits that fosters a sense of distinctiveness, even if these cultural traits are not unique to the ethnic group.7 Ethnicity is often conceptualized in distinction to other forms of social identity, such as class membership or associational identities, that are more situationally based and fluid. The term “nation” is commonly used in the same way as the phrase “ethnic group,” though often with more of an explicit attention to culture. Ernest Gellner’s classic definition of nation describes it as a group with a shared sense of culture—systems of ideas, signs and associations, and ways of behaving and communicating—and whose members recognize that they belong to this group.8 Race is often more narrowly defined yet broadly applied, connoting a group of people grouped by purely physical characteristics such as skin color, without the cultural implications of ethnicity and nation. In this volume, ethnicity and nation are used interchangeably, while race refers to a distinct category. These relatively simple definitions stand against the complex reality of each of these phenomena, as is discussed later in this chapter.


5

Many scholars have examined how periods of institutional change can provide opportunities for ethnic mobilization and conflict. The general argument holds that the political opening accompanying a period of democratization or regime transition alters the balance of power and forces political elites to find new sources of power. These elites often turn to some form of ethnic or nationalist mobilization. For various reasons, this politicization of ethnicity then turns violent during the political transition. Perhaps the most influential of these studies was Jack Snyder’s From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Violence.9 Snyder studied the relationship between democratization and domestic ethnic violence, positing that political opening produces nationalism when powerful elites need to harness popular energies for war and economic development, but do not want to surrender real political authority to the average citizen. The institutional vacuum created during democratization subverts the coercive apparatus of the state, while the new rules governing access to power force elites to find new bases of power. Under these new rules of elections, political competition, and “rule by the people,” elites need to mobilize constituencies for electoral support, yet they still search for a way to avoid ceding genuine control. To solve the resulting collective action problem, Snyder argued, elites often turn to ethnic mobilization, because the social links are preestablished and bounded. Nationalism is just a convenient doctrine, and elite calculations and actions are the crucial facilitating factors in the process from democratization to ethnic mobilization, and then from mobilization to conflict. In a more structural vein, other scholars focused on the link between state weakness, the security dilemma, and ethnic conflict.10 Postauthoritarian democratic transitions often simulate the security dilemma created by a weakened or failing state, because the process of security sector reform often creates a temporary crime wave as police and other internal security forces are restructured. Scholars in this school argue that, in situations in which the state fails to provide security guarantees during political transition, ethnic groups will mobilize in anticipation of persecution and strike preemptively, thereby creating violence. Periods of political opening and transition, therefore, weaken the control of the state and offer opportunities for ethnic mobilization as a form of collective self-defense. These works assume the primacy of ethnic identity in some societies but rarely explain it. For example, Lake and Rothchild state that “in societies where ethnicity is an important basis for identity, group competition often forms along ethnic lines.”11 But why is ethnicity an

6


important basis for identity in the first place, and among all the social identities available for politicization, why does ethnicity become the basis for political competition? Many theories that are otherwise constructivist in their explanation for ethnic conflict embed primordialist assumptions about the importance of the ethnic identity, vis-à-vis other identities that are also available for political articulation. In these analyses, ethnic identities also tend to assume a monolithic nature, without layers or alternate levels on which “nationalist” or “ethnic” identities could have been mobilized. There is a critical gap in these structural accounts because they do not explain why ethnic identities rather than other social groupings are mobilized into conflict, and why certain forms of ethnic identity—national versus local identities, for example—are mobilized. Other theories of ethnic conflict during transitional periods focus more on the norm changes introduced by economic globalization and political liberalization. Globalization and liberalization break down the preexisting social contracts that provided rules and norms governing access to political and economic resources, thereby increasing competition among the various groups in society. Advanced works in this field admit that multicultural diversity alone is not enough to create ethnic violence. Cultural identities lead to conflict only when they have been politically charged.12 Political institutions structure incentives in such a way as to exacerbate or ameliorate the political relevance of cultural identity: just as institutions can promote ethnic conflict, they can also create firebreaks against it. Based on this logic, systems that encourage the expression of ethnic criteria, such as those that previously used ethnicity as a basis for resource allocation, are more vulnerable to violence than systems that allocated rewards on nonethnic criteria. In each of these theories, periods of institutional and structural change, such as those that occur during democratization, alter the basic relationships that govern societies. Elites are forced to find new bases of power, and often locate those in the ethnic bond. Many works assume that ethnic identities are important, without asking what makes them so. More sophisticated works such as those by Shaheen Mozaffar and James R. Scarritt acknowledge this distinction and address it by creating a concept of ethnopolitical groups: ethnic groups with a long-standing history of being politicized. Not all ethnic divisions in society carry political importance, they argue, only those that have been politicized. Even these works, however, begin with the fact of ethnopolitical groups without discussing why some groups become politicized in the first place, while others remain latent.13


7

Ethnic Identity in Africa and Beyond This discussion of the salience or latency of ethnic politics makes certain assumptions about the nature of the ethnic bond. Ethnicity and race can serve as convenient platforms through which to mobilize electoral support, and their relevance is a factor that is manipulated by those who seek power. But their political activation is not inevitable; it depends on a number of other factors. Furthermore, the political importance of ethnic identities may contradict the social relevance of the group, and, once again, the strategic actions of political elites greatly influence this dynamic. Elites choose to activate the ethnic bond in the political arena on the basis of a complex set of incentives set in the formal institutions of power. These dynamics are inherently situational and rely on an understanding of ethnic identities as akin to other, interest-based identities. Discussions of the nature and influence of the ethnic bond have spawned countless works. The debate has evolved over time from the simple dispute between the primordialists and instrumentalists, who disagreed on whether ethnicity was an innate and inevitable characteristic of “divided societies,” to the more recent discussions of social constructivists who problematize even the markers and boundaries that define ethnic as opposed to other social groups. The early primordialists rooted the ethnic bond in notions of biology, kinship, ancestry and evolution, so that members of a group shared a subjective belief in common descent, regardless of an objective blood relationship. This perspective held that ethnic groups are expanded kinship networks that serve as basic dividing lines within societies, embracing “groups differentiated by color, language, and religion; they cover ‘tribes,’ races,’ nationalities,’ and castes.”14 Generated by different evolutionary trajectories between sociocultural groups, the ethnic identity was viewed as ascriptive and inherited at birth, relatively permanent and immutable, and overwhelming in its intensity and networks of mutual obligation.15 These scholars ascribed a primacy to the ethnic bond that led it to triumph over all competing identities and argued that an individual could not simply “opt out” of the ethnic group. Instrumentalists countered that ethnic groups in the twentieth century had been created out of a process of modernization, urbanization, and elite manipulation, and that identification with the ethnic group was rooted in a rational calculation of the strategic efficacy of the ethnic bond.16 “Tribalism,” as it was often labeled in Africa, had been produced out of interactions between indigenous societies and

8


the political and economic systems imposed by colonialism and capitalism in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.17 In this understanding, ethnicity is inherently situational: individuals can change their ethnic affiliation over time, and will promote different layers of their identity (village, clan, tribe, or region), depending on the environment in which they find themselves.18 As a subjective phenomenon, the ethnic identity was defined as a group of people “linked by a consciousness of a special identity, who jointly seek to maximize their corporate political, economic and social interests.”19 The constituent elements of ethnic identity lie in combined remembrances of the past and in common inspirations, values, norms, and expectations. According to these scholars, the ethnic bond is mutable and layered, which renders identification with a particular form of ethnic group strategic, situational, conscious, and flexible: an individual may have multiple ethnic identities with which he or she identifies at different times. Finally, the ethnic bond varies in both intensity and political salience. Scholars emphasizing the malleability of ethnic and communal identities in Africa point to the fact that the modern manifestation of ethnic groups in Africa was strongly shaped by the colonial experience. Ethnic groups arose through an interactive process: colonial powers integrated smaller groups, created greater interaction between them, and privileged some groups over others. This altered the size, composition, and importance of different forms of group identity. Not only did colonial authorities at times amalgamate or divide groups according to considerations of authority and control, but they also altered the relevance of different layers of group identity. By bringing groups together that had previously not interacted, colonial institutions made individuals conscious of group differences that either had not previously existed or had not been invested with importance.20 The Power of the State to Shape Identity The system of indirect rule also created colonial bureaucracies that worked through chosen ethnic intermediaries, further redefining ethnic groups and their relative importance. As a result, contemporary ethnicities in Africa are not only larger in scale and population and more sharply demarcated from each other than were groups in the precolonial era, but the definition of what constitutes an ethnic categorization changed. Africans were active agents in this process through their strategic responses to colonial policies and institutions. Elites advantaged by colonial policies in turn redefined group boundaries and markers to create limits to the new networks of patronage


9

distribution. In the process, they created new ways to differentiate between in- and out-groups, changing the meaning of group membership and what distinguished one group from another. Different forms of authority and the rules of access to political, economic, and social power shaped not only identities on the ground, but also how political actors attempted to mobilize groups. This perspective moves beyond the automatic identification of the primordialists and the strategic calculations of the pure instrumentalists, positing that institutions broadly influence the size, nature, and, content of the ethnic label. Constructivist perspectives such as these have become the current state of the art in research on ethnicity in politics, emphasizing the social production of ethnic boundaries, group membership, and relevance.21 Ethnic identities are considered socially constructed and situationally dependent, not just in the expressly calculated manner of the early instrumentalists, but through more complex and fundamental processes. In one of the most detailed studies of this constitutive process in Africa, David Laitin traced the evolution of what it meant to be “Yoruba” during the era of British colonialism. At the onset of colonial rule, the identity could be defined equally by religious affiliation or lineage in an ancestral village, but over time and in response to colonial institutions, the identity became based only on geographic location.22 This process altered not only the size of the group, but also the very basis of the demarcation between Yoruba and other groups. The collected works in the seminal volume edited by Leroy Vail demonstrated these same dynamics across multiple ethnic groups in southern Africa, and Joshua Forrest’s work traces the evolution of “subnationalism” across the entire continent.23 These and other scholars have been carefully analyzing the constructive process that defined the content, boundaries, and sizes of both ethnic and racial categories in Africa. Works such as these have become the basis for the argument that the concepts of ethnicity, race, and nationalism themselves are socially constructed. Why, Courtney Jung asks, is skin color the marker of race rather than eye color? The one is as arbitrary a marker of a culturally relevant distinction as the other, until society invests importance in the difference.24 The term “race,” has not always denoted skin color: past uses treated “race” and “nation” interchangeably. In the early twentieth century in the United States, for example, southern Europeans were labeled “black.” At that time the label did not refer to skin color, but to the notion of European races. Southern Europeans—Italians, Greeks, and Albanians—were considered fundamentally different from the

10


“races” of northern and western Europe—the Irish, English, and Germans. Only later did the southern Europeans earn the label “white,” as the conception of race evolved from race as nation to race as color.25 Ethnicity, race, religion: both the content of what these labels refer to as well as their importance are determined by a complex process of interaction within each society that is often influenced by government policies. What emerges from these works is the power of the state to alter the both the content and relevance of ethnic and racial categories, and to then institutionalize these conceptions. The process takes place both actively, through the strategic responses of political actors, and passively, through the structuring effects of political institutions. The passive process has been well documented in the institutionalist literature, the active less so. States can base access to political power and economic resources on certain forms of identity and promote certain aspects and expressions of culture over others. In so doing, they may alter the very foundations of the categories. As Anthony Marx phrased it in his study of race in Brazil, South Africa, and the United States, “States made race,” and they did this by choosing to enforce certain forms of racial ideology and by not choosing to enforce others.26 The very basis on which a state is structured can passively shape identity. States that define geographic subunits on ethnic criteria invest those categories with new relevance. For example, the Soviet Union fashioned an entire structure of republics in which they privileged one group in an often multiethnic region, basing the new administrative unit on this group. If there was no titular national group in the region, the regime created one and gave it power, which both invested relevance in the newly created nationality and gave rise to oppositional identities, all along the nationalist or ethnic axis. By creating this system of “nationalist” republics, the Soviet Union created a tier of “national” identities that did not initially correspond to lived realities, but that took on a constructed reality that then structured social and political identities. 27 The result was that ethnic labels became the currency of the realm, biasing the postcommunist states toward divisive expressions of ethnicity and nationalism in the political realm even after the formal system enforcing those divisions had collapsed. By the same logic, centralized ethnofederal republics such as Ethiopia reinforce competition between ethnolinguistically defined groups at the national level but not local, while decentralized systems such as India’s promoted the emergence of lower-level societal differences within states that were structured to align with geographically concentrated linguistic groups.


11

The active processes of identity construction rely on the actions of political actors. These agents define and redefine groups so that public goods can be delivered to particularistic communities, as Fearon’s work on nationalist violence during democratization demonstrates. The active construction process most dramatically unfolds during episodes of rapid political change, especially during periods of democratic transition or decolonization through elections. These transitional periods generate a need to compete in elections and create new coalitions and support bases, and often political actors have turned to ethnic mobilization because ethnicity has served as an information shortcut for both the elites and voters on the ground.28 Without the time or ability to organize issue-based campaigns for rapidly approaching elections, political actors often utilized preexisting informational and communication networks that could generate electoral support coalitions. In societies where these networks were well developed within ethnic communities, such as the newly independent republics in the post-Soviet space, ethnic mobilization resulted. On their side, voters could rely on ethnic cues as shortcuts to estimate which politicians were likely to respond to their interests. This process of mobilization restructured the groups more cohesively, and once constructed, the new identities were institutionalized via access to power and became self-reinforcing.29 The alignment of ethnic support coalitions could be changed, but the politicization of ethnicity of some sort had been primed. To those who invest the ethnic bond with an inherently flexible nature, identity-based conflict is not inevitable. Many authors have even argued that ethnopolitical mobilization can be considered a particular form of interest group politics that arises when the ethnic group becomes the relevant unit in the competition over the resources of political power and economic distribution.30 Ethnic conflict, separate from ethnic politics, occurs only when primed and triggered. Mobilization and subsequent violence arising on the ethnic axis can often be explained though the logic described above: the informational shortcut utility and subsequent priming of ethnic mobilization in the process of political opening. The groups are not given or preordained at the beginning of this process; ethnic blocs can be combined and disaggregated in response to specific incentives and the context of social dynamics specific to each situation during the moment of political opening. Race only became an issue when political structures were based on an ideology of racial superiority, as they were in South Africa and the United States, for example, but not in Brazil. Such analyses focus on the adaptive responses of elites to rapidly changing political situations: for example, the role of elites in

12


organizing groups as they seek to gain and maintain power in the context of democratization. If aspiring political elites manipulate ethnic blocs, ethnicity assumes political salience and can then lead to conflict. If, however, the elites seek power on a different basis, ethnic conflict would not arise. Following this logic, scholars who analyze the active process of identity construction have focused on the roles of elites in constituting social order to explain the latency of social identities or their activation into political identities. For ethnic conflict to occur, the bond first has to be invested with political importance. Social identities do not automatically translate into political ones, and this process of constituting political identities—of mobilizing ethnicity—is often missed by the literature on democratization and ethnic or nationalist violence. Those constructivists who argue for the constitutive power of institutions correctly draw attention to the ability of political and economic institutions alone to invest certain identities with more or less importance, based on the ways that they allocate power and resources. Yet creating sustained ethnic mobilization—the process of channeling these identities into coherent movements capable of mass, coordinated action—necessitates more intentionality and organization. Elites assume the critical role in this process of channeling social importance into organized political movements, but will do this only if there are calculable payoffs. Incentivizing Ethnic Mobilization: Shaping Elite Strategies In any democratic system, voter behavior and party strategies are distinct phenomena that warrant separate investigation. It is only once ethnic or other social identities are imparted with durable political salience that identity-based violence occurs. The way in which these dynamics unfold—the precise devolution from the hope of a democratic transition to the despair of widespread ethnic conflict—is well studied. What all the literature points to is that without the efforts of political leaders and political parties, sustained ethnic conflict is much less likely to occur. Ethnic peace, therefore, can be engineered just as much as ethnic violence. The analysis must therefore ask, when does democratization lead elites to mobilize ethnic, racial, or nationalist bonds? Politicians sell an idea, and voters either purchase it or they do not. The dynamic between leaders and followers, between those who sell a politicized ethnic identity and those who buy into the idea, creates the sustained mobilization


13

of ethnic groups into political divides that can then be channeled into ethnic competition, clashes, and large-scale violence. Whether elites succeed in these efforts is beyond the scope of this work, as it is the next step. Studying the linkages between democratization and nationalist violence hinges on unmasking the factors that lead political leaders to invest particular social identities with political importance in the first place. Political elites make calculated choices about party strategy, and they do this given the complex interaction between political institutions and social cleavages available for activation. Elites choose specific strategies based on the number and type of ethnic markers available for strategic activation in politics, and on whether the resulting patterns of mobilization will be sufficient to achieve the specific goals set, which are often to win elections. Consider one of the most violent episodes of genocidal and ethnic conflict in the twentieth century: the regional wars that engulfed the Balkans in the late 1990s. Even here, elites had to actively sell the idea of nationalism and pure ethnic homelands before the wars could be stoked. Slobodan Milosevic actively sold the idea of Serbian nationalism by steadily and consciously invoking historical myths and narratives dating back to the twelfth century.31 The success of his salesmanship can be measured by the rapid rise of adherents to his rabid discourse and the ensuing conflicts that engulfed the entire region in a series of wars, though his success was bounded by the fact that he and other nationalist leaders still had to coerce large numbers of young men who still refused to answer the nationalist call and serve in their national militaries.32 Milosevic’s rhetoric infected neighboring countries as political aspirants in Slovenia, Croatia, and Bosnia, seeing Milosevic’s success in Serbia, adopted a similar nationalist rhetoric, mobilizing nationalism that led to conflict in their countries.33 It would be a mistake to assume that the Serbian nationalist identity had simply been simmering during the Yugoslav era, waiting to erupt once the controls of the communist regime had loosened. It took a dedicated campaign of speeches, advertisements, and mobilization to raise the salience and sell a rabid form of Serbian nationalism to the people. Once the masses bought into the rhetoric, an entirely different dynamic took over, and conflict was more easily stoked. The selling of the idea was the critical turning point in the conflict and, without the activities of Milosevic and his fellow leaders, the nationalist idea may not have developed into violently mobilized political movements capable of sweeping across the entire region. Once this role for elites is assumed, attention should focus on the factors shaping their strategic calculations. Elites are faced with a

14


range of choices when mobilizing support, even in the context of decolonization and democratization. Understanding ethnic groups as internally differentiated leads to a flexible analysis of their political implications, as levels of group differentiation provide options to combine groups in different ways as context dictates.34 It is a logic similar to the old idea of crosscutting cleavages, but one which takes place within the realm of identity-group distinctions. Group size, combinability, and the relevant sphere of political competition are three important factors shaping strategic choices that have only recently begun to be investigated. First, groups vary in size and the types of ethnic markers that distinguish them, so that they can be combined in various ways. Second, some groups can be nested within others, as the situation warrants, or broken apart. The political importance of these groups stands in relation to other groups in the political unit and the relevant sphere of political competition. Finally, elections for different levels of government (national, regional, or local) require specific support coalitions, and the relative political importance of different groups varies with their expected electoral utility and how they can be combined or separated. These last two factors establish the incentives for whether politicians will opt to mobilize ethnicity, and if they choose such strategies, the ways in which groups can be combined to achieve desired electoral results. Together, these three factors answer the questions motivating this volume: what incentives push political leaders to seek to mobilize ethnopolitical divides or to pursue other strategies, especially when ethnicity has already been mobilized in a previous system? How do political institutions interact with social divisions to create a matrix of incentives that either fosters or discourages ethnic mobilization? This study is based on the assumption that politicizing and then mobilizing ethnicity alone is not sufficient to cause ethnic conflict, but it is a necessary step in the process. It is therefore as important to study when politicization does not occur as when it does. Without ethnic mobilization, the democratic system functions differently and a descent into conflict is much less likely. This work examines in detail the first step to ethnic conflict—sustained ethnic mobilization. Methodology This project began by asking why South Africa has not fallen into ethnic violence during democratization as other countries have, and from there proceeded to a survey of existing literature on the subject. This body of work not only fails to ask why ethnicity becomes an axis


15

of political mobilization in the first place, but it also overpredicts ethnic violence during democratization. A consideration of how states and political institutions shape both the constitutive elements of ethnic identity and the choices of political elites serves as a remedy to the former oversight and to bound the predictions of the latter. Following Daniel Ziblatt’s prescription that an appropriate level of generalization should aim to generate middle-range theories that are grounded in a specific case but can generalize to a broader set of cases,35 the project develops a series of case studies that generate a dialogue between the experience of political parties in South Africa and the theory developed in the first two chapters. The result is a contextually grounded work that generates middle-range theory about ethnic mobilization during periods of political opening. By studying politics at the local level, one can learn about power dynamics that are likely to be reproduced in other settings.36 This study focuses on the supply of ethnic mobilization, making the strong claim that enduring ethnopolitical cleavages are not likely to occur in the absence of political parties that attempt to mobilize ethnicity. This analysis obviously places great emphasis on the role of elites, parties, and other political actors in mobilizing ethnic identities. I do not deny the fact that in certain instances there may be some degree of bottom-up demand for ethnic mobilization,37 but I submit that while important, ethnic awareness that arises without being capitalized on by political elites will not evolve into organized political competition, and from there into systemic violence. The ethnic riot, as Donald Horowitz discusses, is a specific form of ethnic conflict,38 and it rarely evolves into the large-scale, systemic violence that sustained ethnic mobilization can create. Since I am investigating the supply of ethnic mobilization, I am logically drawn to examine either political parties or individual candidates as the unit of analysis, depending on whether a particular system is party- or candidate-centric. Outside of local elections, South Africa has virtually no independent candidates running in elections, and therefore is an extremely party-centric system. Here, political parties are the vehicles that most directly link citizens to the state, and they are the organizations that seek to mobilize and structure political allegiances. Therefore, they are primary agents in either manipulating ethnic identities and stoking ethnic violence, or in preventing the emergence of politicized ethnic divides. Because the unit of analysis is the political party, I chose to focus on individual parties within one country. In this way, context is held constant: the political institutions, history, and the structure of social

16


divisions are uniform across the cases, but variation is introduced because the history, starting point, and organizational base of each party differ, though in the end they all made similar strategic calculations. Therefore, we can compare how different political elites chose to adapt to the same set of constraints. South Africa serves as a crucial case for studying the lack of ethnic mobilization precisely because so many had expected the country to experience the phenomenon, and because its history of both ethnic and racial mobilization should have primed politics in those directions. The lack of large-scale ethnic and explicit racial motivation makes the case that much more compelling. The four parties selected for case study in this volume—the ANC, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), the Democratic Alliance (DA, formerly the Democratic Party, or DP), and the New National Party (NNP, formerly known as the National Party, or NP)—reflected a wide diversity in electoral success, political orientation, support base, and historical origin. At the time this study was conducted, they were the four most significant political parties in the South African system. The ANC and the IFP are historically black parties; both have roots in the liberation struggle. The IFP historically was an ethnic party representing Zulus. In contrast, the ANC was officially “non-racial,” primarily representing the aspirations of the oppressed (i.e., nonwhite South Africans). The DA and NNP are historically white parties, with the DA typically representing English South Africans, and the NNP representing Afrikaners.39 These parties varied in electoral success— the ANC and the DA vastly outperformed the NNP and the IFP—and each one has adopted a different strategy of electoral mobilization. For each case, I focused on critical junctures that constituted turning points for each party in the period between 1994 and 2004. In discussions of their interaction with the electorate, parties are treated largely as unitary actors, though while tracing the evolution of party strategies, the analysis focuses on the varying motivations and differentiated perspectives of groups within the parties. In each of these periods the party openly debated questions of strategy, positioning, and what constituencies it should seek to represent. The choices were later put into practice and tested in electoral contests for the 1994 and 2004 national and provincial elections. In all the cases under study here, despite different starting points, party elites explicitly contemplated both the institutional constraints and their calculations of electoral payoffs that led them to turn away from ethnic mobilization. The data for the case studies was collected through a variety of methods. The discussion of social cleavages in South Africa relies


17

heavily on census data from the 1996 and 2001 population censuses, and is supplemented with several studies of poverty and income in South Africa. Information on the election campaigns was collected in three rounds of fieldwork: from February 1999 to January 2000, from September 2000 to January 2001, and from March 2004 to May 2004. Materials and information on party campaigns were collected through firsthand observation of election meetings and rallies, participation in an election monitoring organization, interviews with party members, and supplementary data from the print and electronic media and election newsletters provided by South African organizations. Secondary sources were used to provide information on the 1994 elections and to supplement information on the 2004 elections. While useful to establish patterns, a cross-country, large-n study would have not been feasible for the subject under discussion. One reason is that the analytical focus on strategic choice and its role in the presence or absence of ethnic mobilization necessitates an examination of why parties choose particular strategies of mobilization. At this early stage of theory development, this required a case-based approach. Quantitative analysis would have failed to yield detailed information about the motivating factors and debates that led to important decisions about party strategy and orientation. It would also not have been practical to conduct in-depth field research on party electoral campaigns across a large number of countries (though as new databases become available, that constraint might loosen). Finally, conducting a local-level study of party activities provides insight into the motivations of the organizations as they conduct their daily tasks and seek to address concrete situations.40 Organization and Main Findings The first three chapters develop the theoretical framework that I use to explain ethnic latency in South Africa. This and the second chapter lay out the theory underlying the framework, while the third chapter analyses South Africa’s political institutions and social divisions. In the same chapter, I show that despite the formal trappings of federalism, South Africa in fact operates as a unitary state with extremely centralized power. I also show that the latency of ethnic mobilization is not due to a lack of ethnic identities: a variety of opinion poll data demonstrate that ethnic, cultural, and linguistic identities are highly salient and important. Other important social identities are religion, race, and class. None of these is mobilized above all others, and the remainder of the chapter explains how the nationalized

18


power structure provides incentives to mobilize large, nationwide groups, rather than small ethnic communities. The chapters that follow introduce the cases. For the reader unfamiliar with South African politics, chapter 4 presents a brief overview of postapartheid electoral politics, focusing on the creation and consolidation of the ANC-led dominant party system and opposition party alignments. Each of the following case study chapters presents a brief history of the party, and then focuses on the strategic choices between 1994 and 2004. The chapters conclude with a review of how these choices were borne out in the electoral campaigns for the 1999 and 2004 national and provincial elections. In each case, party leaders chose forms of political mobilization that reflected the interaction of institutional and societal incentives. The case studies illustrate how most opposition party strategists rejected ethnic mobilization, because ethnicity was likely to deliver only a small payoff in the short term, even though ethnic mobilization had the potential to woo supporters away from the ANC in the long run. The political calculus of democratic elections forces elites to focus on the short-term goal, and in South Africa, this demanded a significant presence during the crucial first five to ten years, when important decisions were being made in the national legislature about how the country would be restructured in the postapartheid era. Instead of fighting the ANC, opposition parties competed with each other for the small pool of voters outside the ANC’s support base. Thus, the DA and NNP attempted to define political competition along a dual axis of official nonracialism, yet also capitalizing on a significant overlap of race and class divisions to appeal to largely minority-based communities. The IFP responded to these incentives by attempting to move beyond a purely ethnic appeal and to generate a national, conservative support base. At the same time, the ANC did anything it could to prevent the mobilization of any cleavage—ideological, ethnic, or regional— that had the potential to threaten its hold on its supporters. Finally, the conclusion discusses the implications that this perspective has for the future of South African politics and for more general theoretical debates in the study of comparative politics. The analysis makes a variety of theoretical contributions that speak to at least two broad fields of inquiry: the way in which political institutions structure politics and influence the construction of political cleavages, and the relationship between democratization and ethnic violence. The South African case would indicate that it is possible to prevent the emergence of divisive ethnic politics, but that the mechanisms at work are relatively complex. It is not just an issue of finding the right


19

electoral formula, but one of electoral formula, the distribution of power, and the social and interest groups available for mobilization. An examination of how these factors interact in the specific context of the South Africa reveals dynamics that are likely to be reproduced far beyond the borders and particularities of one country. The lessons of constitutional engineering—how various types of political institutions interact, and how political agents operate within a set of institutional and social factors—hold for virtually any country with social divisions, political institutions, and political parties. In other words, they are applicable to virtually any democratic or democratizing country in the world.


Chapter 2

Shaping Strategies of Political Mobilization

T

he argument advanced in this volume rests on the interaction of three principle variables: the electoral system, the concentration of power, and the relative size of various ethnic groups in the country. Parties will court the societal, interest or identity-based groups that are capable of forming minimum winning electoral coalitions for the tier of power at which they desire to secure representation. In a context of nationalized power and small ethnic groups, parties can be induced to turn away from mobilizing ethnicity because this strategy does not deliver large enough support coalitions. Smaller groups become more relevant when power is decentralized and policymaking and spending powers are genuinely devolved to regional or local spheres, which are elected independently from the national tier. In this context, the relevance of groups that are too small to be viable vehicles to secure power at the national level can assume a greater relevance for elections at more local levels, where they may constitute larger shares of the total population. When there are no incentives to seek out ethnic power, ethnic mobilization diminishes, and ethnicity is less likely to become an axis of political competition. Without sustained political mobilization, ethnic identities are less likely to become vested with an importance that could lead to conflict and violence. Ultimately, this argument is both institutional and agentive. Institutional factors shape the choices of political actors as they devise strategies of mobilization in a time of political opening, which, in this analysis, occurs during a process of democratization. When ethnicity is not mobilized by elites, it loses much of its ability to create violence, and politics becomes entrenched on a track that allows more diversity

22


and debate in the political realm. If political institutions reward ethnic mobilization, as they do in many transitional settings, the opposite will occur: elites will generate a form of politics predicated on zero-sum competition between exclusive ethnic identities, and conflict becomes more likely. No single institution conditions this choice, however. The activation or latency of politicized ethnicity depends, ultimately, on relative group size in relation to the locus of power in the political system, and is either facilitated or made more difficult by the permissiveness of the electoral system. Analyses of the effectiveness of constitutional engineering to mitigate the effects of communal divisions often hinge on the type of electoral system most appropriate to prevent the emergence of divisive ethnic conflict in democratic divided societies.1 Within this debate, scholars have devoted most of their attention to the relationship between ethnic divisions, electoral systems, and the nature of political parties and political competition. The contours of the debate follow the logic of minimum thresholds for representation, whether electoral systems force appeals to the median voter or allow mobilization of fringe groups, and whether competition becomes zero-sum or permits multiple winners. When political candidates, party leaders and campaign strategists devise mobilization strategies, they do not consider only the electoral system. They also take into account the level of power for which they are competing and the types of groups that are available for persuasion. Campaigns for national legislatures and for local assemblies usually target different audiences, and each tier of government requires a different type of support coalition to be knitted together. Campaign appeals can be couched along a continuum from broad issues to specific local concerns, depending on the tier of government for which a party or individual is campaigning. Competition will be most fierce for the level of government that has the most power and control over lucrative resources. For example, if all political power rests in the national tier, parties will attempt to gain representation at that level, but if subregional governments wield significant amounts of power, then lower levels of government become a locus of competition. In turn, this will affect the type of coalitions that parties seek to construct and their mobilizational strategies. This chapter generates a theory of interacting institutional and social incentives, laying out the independent and joint influence of electoral systems, concentration of power, and social divisions in a society on strategies of political mobilization.

S H A P I N G S T R AT E G I E S O F M O B I L I Z AT I O N

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Political Institutions and Party Strategies As they influence parties and party systems, political institutions can have mechanical effects, such as the fragmentation or concentration of party systems, but also more dynamic effects to shape the dimensions along which political competition is likely to develop. The mechanical effects of institutions on party systems have been widely studied, but the ways that institutions shape the contours of political competition have been less well analyzed. In part, this is because the manner in which institutions affect political competition is much less determinate than the mechanical influence of electoral rules on party system fragmentation. Political competition emerges through the interaction of several factors. The precise structuring effect of political institutions will depend on how the institutional pressures are refracted through the society in which they are implanted. The same constellation of institutions can have vastly different effects in a “deeply divided” society with one fundamental bifurcation than in one with a multitude of small, fluid social groups. Social cleavages, history, and political culture strongly influence the lines of potential political division that will become active or remain latent. Political institutions interact with all of these factors to create incentive sets that favor or work against certain types of mobilization strategies. In addition, various types of institutions, such as electoral rules and the organization of the state, interact with each other to affect the lines along which political competition emerges and stabilizes. Institutional structures may induce parties to make broadly based, inclusive appeals for support, or they may reward parties that carve out narrow niches in geographically limited constituencies.2 Electoral Rules Of all the political institutions that shape politics, the collective wisdom is that electoral rules are the most important. The literature on ethnic divisions, electoral systems, and party systems argues that, in countries with multiple and divisive social cleavages, proportional representation (PR) electoral systems often create fragmented political party systems based on ethnic and other ascriptive identities. Because electoral rules can raise or lower barriers to entry in the political system, they determine the nature of electoral coalitions needed to win seats in legislatures, which in turn influences both the number of parties and the type of support base needed to win seats. The two central differences between proportional representation and

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majoritarian constituency models—whether or not votes need to be concentrated in geographical districts, and the number of votes necessary to win seats—affect the nature of mobilization necessary to gain representation.3 Explaining why parties choose to reject politicizing ethnicity forces us to focus on the ways in which electoral rules shape strategies of partisan mobilization.4 The debate on the relationship between party systems and ethnic mobilization focuses most often on the choice between a permissive PR system and a centralizing plurality-based system. The baseline prediction is that permissive electoral systems facilitate the representation of small parties, and thus are considered to provide incentives for political entrepreneurs to cultivate electoral coalitions based on identity groups, even if they are small and marginal. In contrast, systems with stricter standards for representation, such as those requiring majorities concentrated in geographic constituencies, tend to weed out smaller parties, forcing parties to appeal to larger, more encompassing constituencies.5 Electoral institutions thus directly affect strategies of mobilization. First-past-the-post (FPTP), plurality electoral systems with large districts should induce parties to campaign on issues that will be of concern to a broad audience, since the party needs to win either a plurality or majority of the citizens in a diverse geographic constituency. If the society has no deep divisions that segment the country into one majority and one minority, parties in these systems most often seek out the median voter, which moderates their appeals and creates broad, inclusive coalitions. If a FPTP system operates in a country with a definable ethnic majority and definable ethnic minority, then the party system supposedly will reflect this social pattern in political mobilization, leading to unstable outcomes. Proportional representation electoral systems are often expected to provide more stable results in a divided society, because they foster the representation and inclusion of all social groups in the political system.6 Writing on Iraq, for example, Dawisha and Diamond asserted that the UN officer in charge of choosing an electoral system for the country had settled on a one-tier, national district PR system in part because “the single nationwide district would make it easier ‘for [ethnic and religious] communities that have been broken up and dispersed around Iraq . . . to be able to accumulate their votes and to vote with like-minded people.’ ”7 This demonstrates the common argument that under PR systems, parties can seek to mobilize particular constituencies that may be small and/or geographically dispersed to gain seats in the legislature based purely on the number of votes that


25

this group can deliver. Ethnic mobilization is thought to be more likely because parties can mobilize smaller groups and still win seats. While many consider this positive because it includes groups in government, others consider it negative because these same dynamics can lead PR electoral systems to fragment the party system, separate representatives from their constituents, and either help to politicize ethnicity when previously it had not been not worth mobilizing or reify the position of groups in conflict.8 Both perspectives agree that systems that elect representatives in proportion to the percentage of votes received generate incentives for the mobilization of relatively small groups, since any party that attains the threshold can expect access to the legislature.9 Mobilizing small groups would often be electoral suicide under a majoritarian or firstpast-the-post single-member constituency system; however, in a PR system, a party that does not need to win a constituency would be free to mobilize small and nongeographically delimited constituencies, such as minority and marginal groups. Context will determine the precise impact of different electoral systems. PR does not always lead to party fragmentation and majoritarian systems do not necessarily create centrifugal politics. Imposing higher thresholds can limit the fragmentary effects of a permissive PR system, while plurality systems can introduce multimember districts or alternative vote systems that also increase small-group representation. Joel Barkan has argued that FPTP systems in Africa reproduce the fragmentary nature of PR systems because the geographic concentration of ethnic groups in specific locations creates a structure of ethnic fiefdoms.10 For the sake of simplicity, this discussion has kept to an extremely basic level, but there is an entire world of electoral systems that have been designed to create specific outcomes, which are all responsive to how particular constellations of electoral laws are likely to refract through a society’s structure of social divisions.11 Distribution of Power Those who focus solely on the link between electoral systems and ethnic mobilization and conflict overlook a critical issue: the distribution of power. Where does power lie in the political system? This question is crucial to understanding strategies of mobilization, because parties will seek the support of groups that are capable of getting them the most number of seats in the tier of government for which they are competing. National representation in large districts

26


requires that parties draw the support of large numbers of voters, while representation in lower tiers of government requires fewer votes. Groups that are small on the national scale may be large in a particular subregion, so party mobilization strategies must consider the tier of government for which they are competing most. The relevant political unit—national, regional, or local—thus interacts with the distribution and relative size of groups in society. In the literature on ethnic politics and ethnic conflict, the structure of government figures centrally as a method to manage ethnic conflict after it has surfaced. Federal systems have received the most attention for their potential to devolve power and reduce conflict in countries with conflict-prone, geographically based divisions such as regional rivalries, ethnoterritorial groups, or concentrated religious minorities. Analysts suggest creating federal systems in these situations because increasing the tiers of government increases the opportunities for groups to obtain representation in government while defusing the intensity of competition for power at the center.12 The influence of the structure of power on the form of political competition has received much less attention. Those studies that have been done have focused on mechanical effects, such as legislative fragmentation, and government effectiveness and efficiency. For example, in one representative article on the impact of federalism on ethnic separatism, the author devoted one paragraph to the influence of federal systems on party systems, focusing on the mechanical impact of federalism on legislative fragmentation.13 There was no mention of the potential for federalism to affect the very nature of political mobilization. This is not to single out the author for criticism, but to point out the fact that most work in this area examines the mechanical effects of federalism on the number of parties in the overall system and the cohesiveness of parties in legislatures. The concentration or dispersion of power can shape party systems in very direct ways. A federal system that genuinely devolves power will cause parties to compete for power at lower levels in the political sphere, fostering the development of regional or local political parties. This dynamic creates incentives for parties to mobilize constituencies that are potentially important on a local or provincial, but not national, level. Unitary or centralized federal systems, in contrast, by focusing genuine competition on the national political arena, lead parties to focus on large social groups that are capable of delivering significant representation in the national unit. The composition of social groups (whether ideological, interest-based, religious, regional, ethnic, or some other identity) varies across each country, creating a fluid menu


27

of identities available for political activation. The contours of political mobilization will therefore depend on the electoral system, the level of power for which a party competes, and the array of identities available to mobilize. Federal systems theoretically could increase incentives to mobilize ethnic or other small groups, because at lower levels of political competition, these groups become politically relevant, thereby rewarding support bases. Nigeria serves as prime example in this regard, where states were created to activate the social identities that existed underneath the three-part Igbo-Yoruba-Hausa/Fulani divide that had proven fatally destructive in the First and Second Republics. States were created explicitly to grant smaller ethnic groups increased political relevance and control over their affairs. Groups that had not been politically relevant under a three-region political system became important in a state system, which induced political entrepreneurs to mobilize groups to seek their own states. The process repeated itself over and over, leading to a continuous process of state creation.14 Unitary systems, in contrast, by focusing competition for power on the national level where small ethnic groups cannot confer large electoral rewards, provide disincentives to mobilize small groups. Instead, nationally focused political competition under unitary systems more often seeks out the median voter, since parties have to construct larger winning coalitions. Presidential and parliamentary systems similarly affect the focus of political competition, with presidential systems, like unitary organization, focusing party politics on the national arena.15 The debate on party systems and ethnic mobilization, therefore, must analyze the joint incentives created by both types of political institutions. These two factors interact in a dynamic way to shape party system development. Taken together, electoral rules and the structure of government create interacting incentive structures that party elites respond to when deciding where to focus scarce resources in the struggle to gain political representation. This joint incentive structure in turn interacts with the dimensions of social cleavages to shape mobilization strategies as parties attempt to craft support coalitions capable of providing the votes necessary to win legislative representation at the designated level. Centralized political systems could therefore counteract the fragmentary pressures of a PR system, so that, even if parties can appeal to small ethnic communities, it may not be in their interest to do so. This is because parties consider the electoral system and tier of power for which they want to contest, and then look to the groups available for mobilization.

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The Structure of Social Divisions Extending this logic, it becomes important to consider the constellation of groups in a specific context. The structure of social divisions, especially the degree to which they are crosscutting or cumulative, affects not only the malleability of political mobilization, but also the menu of groups available for political activation. Whether the electoral system forces votes to be geographically concentrated or allows dispersion also affects the malleability of mobilization strategies, but the relative size of groups, in relation to the level of power for which parties compete, is the critical variable influencing whether parties will seek to aggregate groups into larger political units, or to differentiate groups from each other.16 These insights, while they may appear logical and obvious, have only lately appeared in works on how social divisions influence party formation. In the earliest works on party formation, sociological theorists posited that sociological variables create common group interests that form the bases for political parties.17 The seminal work in this vein was Lipset and Rokkan’s study of party systems and voter alignments, in which they tied the development of party systems to a historical sequence of political conflicts and their attendant social cleavages.18 The basic social cleavage model developed from this early work held that social conflicts arose during the development of the modern state, and that as these conflicts achieved political expression through political parties they became frozen, because parties were able to establish themselves on these lines of conflict and hence prolong the dimensions of cleavage that they represent.19 The model was predicated on a satisfying logic: individuals use informational shortcuts to obtain information about candidates and parties in the easiest way possible, rather than seeking out all possible information before making electoral decisions. Therefore, voters use sociological cues to obtain information about the interests of politicians (based on their class position, religious background, race, etc.), which are then used to guide their choices. On this model, a voter will cast his or her vote for the party which historically has supported the social groups to which that voter belongs, accumulating additional information about various parties from cues such as the endorsements of labor unions, business associations, and religious groups, as well as the group appeals of the parties themselves. Owing to the stable group base of each party, voters develop standing partisan predispositions that endure across elections.


29

The arguments developed differently in ethnically divided societies. Theorists on party formation in ethnically divided societies argued that due to their permeative and coercive nature, ethnic divisions would inevitably dominate politics and be reproduced in political party systems.20 The logic for this approach combines the emotive aspect of primordialism with the more instrumentally based acknowledgment that membership in an ethnic group creates common group interests that shape party coalitions and define perceptions about which parties are attuned most to the needs of various social groups.21 When translated into the party system, these common group interests form the bases for political parties, and the emotive nature of ethnic affiliations causes the ethnic identity to trump all others to become the defining basis for political mobilization. While the original model treated parties as passive receptacles that took social divisions as given, later works on Western Europe conceded that political parties do not just mirror social cleavages and that political elites have some latitude to pick and choose between social divisions. 22 Studies of the developing world nuanced their arguments as well, though they still argued for the tendency for ethnic ties to overwhelm all others in the political realm. As Horowitz wrote, Nowhere, of course, is politics simply reducible to the common denominator of ethnic ties. Even in the most severely divided society, there are also other issues. Nor do ethnic affiliations govern behavior in all situations. . . . Everywhere there exist buyers and sellers, officials and citizens, co-workers and members of professions; all of these roles are to some degree independent of the ethnic origin of their incumbents. . . . The degree of this independence, however, varies widely. . . . Although ethnic affiliations can be compartmentalized—that is, their relevance can be limited to some spheres and contexts—there is nonetheless a tendency to seepage. In deeply divided societies, the argument is that strong ethnic allegiances permeate organizations, activities, and roles to which they are formally unrelated.23

Because they start with the politicization of ethnic difference at a certain point in time and work backward to assume that the particular observed line of cleavage must be the fundamental division in society, the classic works on politics in ethnically divided societies cannot explain the conditions under which one identity will become more salient than another. More nuanced works can help to explain when certain identities will trump others. For example, in his study of two ethnic groups in Zambia and Malawi, Daniel Posner found that individuals identified with a certain ethnic category only if that group

30


was “politically relevant.” If the group was too small to be politically efficacious in the relevant political unit, individuals identified with the next largest identity group in their matrix of potential identities. 24 Group size, not in absolute terms, but relative to the political arena, can be critical in explaining when certain identities become politically salient and when they remain latent. When analyzing why some groups are mobilized and not others, Posner’s findings should immediately focus attention on both the composition of social groups and the structure of power in a political system. In a line of argument directly parallel to the one offered in this work, Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich provide evidence that ethnopolitical cleavages interact with institutional structures to render only some of a society’s divisions politically relevant. 25 Taking on the logic of the “deeply divided society,” they argue that not all ethnic divides are created equal: both ethnopolitical dispersion and concentration are critical factors in whether or not ethnic divides become politically relevant. Even the most “deeply divided” societies contain more than one axis of social division, yet often only one line of cleavage becomes politically important. More recent works on ethnic mobilization work on these assumptions, advancing beyond the early emphasis on the primordalist urgency of ethnic affiliations, to argue that elites, even in ethnically divided societies, have choices in the groups they seek to mobilize. The works of Chandra and Wilkinson, discussed in the first chapter, fall within this camp. When elites then choose to court ethnic identities, what makes this mobilization successful? Combining the insights from the literature on Western Europe with recent work in Chandra’s vein yields the notion that, while ethnic identities can be strong influences on party systems, they require political entrepreneurs to organize them. As they seek to advance their careers, political entrepreneurs attempt to construct winning electoral coalitions out of the various groups in society. Elites are not, however, simply free to pick and choose at will; the latitude for picking and choosing social identities for political activation is constrained both by history and by the fact that politicized divisions will endure only if they are based on “fundamental” social cleavages. 26 Historically, certain axes of mobilization may have been delegitimized by past political manipulation, such as divide-and-rule tactics or the denigration of certain groups. If entrepreneurs seek to activate these identities into a viable base, they will have to work against the stigma associated with the identity. As the mobilization of the


31

scheduled castes and tribes in India shows, this is not an impossible task, and it may be aided by institutional recognition (such as the allocation of parliamentary seats to certain groups). What are “fundamental cleavages”? This concept refers to the social receptivity of certain identities over others as a basis for enduring political activation: [political] cleavages may arise through political leadership at a high level (national parties, national leaders) but [only] those cleavages for which there is a receptive social base take on a life of their own, as it were, and are prolonged by individual and local mechanisms beyond the strategic maneuvers in which they originated. Cleavages for which there is no such social base may be just as dramatic as “socially based” ones, but they do not last any longer than the maneuvers of which they are an expression.27

The strategies and tactics of elites provide the initial mobilization along a particular line of conflict, but whether that dimension becomes an enduring political cleavage depends on whether there is a receptive social base for it. Claggett et al. do not define what makes a social base “receptive” to political mobilization; the default is to assume that, of all social cleavages, ethnicity is the most receptive to political manipulation. The ideas presented by those who argue for context demonstrate that group size, concentration, and relevance nuance these basic assumptions about social receptivity to political activation. Shaping Politics: The Interaction of Institutions and Social Divides Combining the institutional and demographic perspectives, I argue that political elites and parties select from a menu of options when seeking to construct winning electoral coalitions. Political agents examine the structure of power and decide where to focus their efforts to gain political representation. Once this goal is set, they consider the nature of the electoral system and the demands it creates for the translation of votes into seats. With these structuring conditions accounted for, parties then survey the groups that are available for political mobilization, note their size and distribution, consider whether groups can be joined together or broken off of a larger unit, and then seek to construct a support base that will meet their goals. Parties will not seek to mobilize small ethnic groups if those groups

32


cannot deliver concrete electoral benefits. Thus, even in a permissive electoral system, we may not necessarily witness the genesis of ethnic mobilization and the politicization of ethnic identities if the groups are small and power is centralized. Strategies of political mobilization therefore reflect choices that are made in consideration of several factors. Each case study in this volume locates distinct points in time when party elites made strategic choices not to mobilize ethnicity, and chose instead to seek to knit together broader coalitions. Party fragmentation, when it occurred, happened because some political actors thought they would have a better chance under a different organization than their parent one, or because a political entrepreneur saw an opportunity to mobilize a new political bloc. There is a mechanical aspect to this process, of course, but what is more important is that there is agency. Political actors examine the institutional structure (degree of centralization and type of electoral system), and from this determine the level of power for which they will contest, the degree of representation necessary to hold political influence, and the number and distribution of votes necessary to achieve representation. At the same time, the agents consider the society in which they live: what is the group structure, what are the salient and latent social divides, what groups are easily mobilizable. These are the threads that political agents weave when crafting a mobilizational strategy that will attempt to piece together winning electoral coalitions. To take just one recent example of this process, consider the attempts to create a stable, democratic government in Iraq. When the United States went into Iraq in March 2003, the administration assumed that the primary cleavages in the Iraqi population were between Sunnis, Shi’a, and Kurds. Therefore, when setting up the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) and the Interim Governing Council (IGC), the United States insisted in a power-sharing formula based mainly on providing representation for these three groups. The federated structure of the country reinforces the primacy of these three groups: Iraqi provinces are drawn to create Sunni, Kurdish, and Shi’a areas, with a few multiethnic provinces in the heart of the country. The selected electoral system, closed list proportional representation, was designed to enable the smaller groups—Sunnis and Kurds—to earn political representation. All of this was done on the assumption that, in posttransition Iraq, the Sunni-Shi’a-Kurd conflict would be the one to be defused. This arrangement denies the fact that there is a very extensive tribal structure in Iraq that cuts across the sectarian divide, and that


33

members of these three groups have intermarried to a great degree in certain areas.28 By investing political resources into the three-way split and according federated powers to provinces aligned with the groups, the United States virtually guaranteed that political parties would organize along this tripartite split and not attempt to mobilize less conflict-prone, lower-level divides such as the tribal one. As a result, in the December 2005 elections for the Iraqi National Assembly, the three groups confronted each other as solid blocks in the political arena, and sectarian divisions are now engulfing the country in civil war. There have been limited attempts to politically mobilize the divisions within the dominant Shi’a group or to generate political appeals that cut across the group divides. Most recently, Iraq scholars and policy experts have begun to blame the sectarian violence on these actions of the United States. 29 For these reasons, scholars of constitutional engineering in divided societies must consider a broader range of institutional incentives that structure the expression of ethnic politics, rather than just the narrow focus on electoral systems. The structure of government and the devolution of power are critical institutional arrangements that impact the relationship between ethnic divisions and political party development. Most analysts discuss federalism as a mechanism to reduce the stakes of political competition, rather than as an instrument to shape the form that political competition takes in the first place.30 The debate over federal versus unitary systems enters the discussion at the level of conflict-resolution measures. Yet the nexus between electoral rules and the level on which parties compete (national, regional, or local) holds enormous implications for the types of social cleavages that political parties will attempt to exploit as they seek political power. In South Africa, I argue that a dynamic similar to that found in Iraq occurred during the first decade of democracy, though without Iraq’s divisive outcome. By devaluing provincial power and establishing a nongeographically based, permissive electoral system, South Africa focused political competition at the center. In turn, competing for national power demanded that parties construct large electoral coalitions capable of delivering significant numbers of seats in the national legislature. With their sights thus set, party strategists devised mobilization strategies to achieve their electoral goals, which meant courting large groups that could provide some challenge to ANC dominance, but that did not necessarily seek to unseat the ruling party. In this process, party strategists eschewed ethnic and other small-group mobilization, because none of the ethnic groups in

34


South Africa were large enough to provide significant national-level representation. Contrary to expectations, between 1994 and 2004, South African opposition party leaders made conscious decisions to turn away from strategies that exploited potential ethnic divisions, especially those divisions located within the ruling African National Congress (ANC). With political institutions nationalizing power, parties set about constructing support blocks out of the most easily manipulable societal cleavages, given the individual party’s existing situation in the political marketplace. Parties reacted differently to the same set of incentives, though all sought to gain short-term, large-scale representation in the national political arena over the provincial legislatures. Thus, the Democratic Party/Democratic Alliance (DP/DA) and New National Party (NNP) attempted to define political competition along lines based on the overlap of race and class divisions, while other parties, such as the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), attempted to move beyond a purely ethnic appeal. In short, opposition parties in South Africa have pursued mobilization strategies that avoided narrow ethnic appeals, instead of attempting to create large parties with influence in the national tier of government. Opposition parties thus did not even attempt mobilize support along any number of potential social cleavages, which has helped the country to avoid divisive ethnic mobilization, and in turn, ethnic violence. In the context of political institutions that focus power at the national level, an electoral system that does not require support to be concentrated in geographic constituencies, and social cleavages most easily manipulated along the racial divide, parties took the course that offered the largest short-term electoral payoffs. There was simply no incentive to engage in ethnic politics. This dynamic suggests a more complex interaction of social divisions and political institutions than envisaged in most works in this field. The interactions of these elements create a set of incentive structures that will shape the strategic choices made by political parties. Structural features—the degree of power centralization, electoral rules, and the structure of social cleavages—fundamentally shape the contours of political competition because of the way they interact to influence the choice of mobilization strategies. Ethnic politics is not a given in a divided society, and voting does not always lead to violence. Political agents construct support bases in alignment with the incentives set by the political institutions and the menu of mobilization provided for in the social fabric. Without


35

acknowledging the layered effect of how these various institutions interact, however, following the standard prescriptions for constitutional/electoral engineering to channel ethnic mobilization and federalism to prevent ethnic conflict may, in fact, create more problems. We may get an Iraq instead of a South Africa.


Chapter 3


Should the rejection of ethnic mobilization still not seem notewor-

thy, consider the following facts. In late February 1999 the Inkatha Freedom Party launched its national election campaign in a stadium outside of Johannesburg. The rally introduced the party’s election manifesto and covered many issues, none of them either explicit or coded ethnic appeals. Buthelezi and all the speakers appeared in Western suits, not the tribal attire or the animal pelts they occasionally wear. No one on the podium carried a knobkerrie, sjambok, or any other “traditional” weapon. Most in the crowd wore urban street clothing, and only a small minority wore some form of traditional Zulu beading, headdress, or carried spears (outside the stadium). Later, the nightly English language news broadcast of the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) ran a short item on the rally. In the approximately half minute devoted to the manifesto launch, the announcer described how the “Zulu Inkatha Freedom Party” had held a rally in Jabulani Stadium to introduce the 1999 campaign manifesto. While the script of the broadcast was relatively neutral, the accompanying video footage drove home the perception that the IFP was a Zulu party. For almost the entire duration of the clip, the cameras zoomed in on the few individuals in beaded Zulu headdress and the small group of young men roving on the outskirts with spears. The message was clear: in the eyes of the media, and by extension all of South Africa, the IFP was a Zulu party. The broadcast typified the SABC’s coverage of the IFP throughout the 1999 campaign season, despite the fact that IFP had spent the previous year, and would spend much of the following five, attempting to shed this association. If South Africans truly held such deep

38


convictions that the IFP could never be anything other than a Zulu organization, then why would Inkatha ever try to shed this label? Similarly, why would the NP reject a strategy that had brought it to power in 1948 and enabled it to remain there for the next fifty years? This chapter focuses on detailing the incentive structure that motivated opposition party elites to choose these nonethnic strategies. It analyzes the way that political institutions centralize power in the national tier, by looking at both the constitution and the way that the ruling ANC has shaped the functioning of the political system. The chapter also surveys the variety of social divisions available for political activation, showing that some identity groups in South Africa are layered and nested, while others crosscut each other. Race and class intersect in a manner that becomes particularly intriguing for electoral purposes, while ethnic groups surface as important sites of social identity. Ethnicity is not politically latent because it is not socially relevant: ethnic, racial, and religious identities are almost equally important as sources of social identity in South Africa. Creating Political Institutions: Negotiations for the Permanent Constitution The process of institutional choice and development reveals important dynamics about why certain arrangements are selected and how they will structure politics. Owing to its electoral hegemony in the 1994 election, the ANC became the dominant negotiating partner during the deliberations of the Constituent Assembly (CA).1 Thus, it was the party with the most influence over the design of the country’s new institutions. The ANC was not the only agent in the process, as the power-sharing provisions contained in the Interim Constitution had provided for a Government of National Unity (GNU), in which the NP and the IFP won important positions in 1994. In the drafting of the final constitution, while the ANC was certainly the senior negotiating partner, it nevertheless had to concede to some of the demands and positions of other parties, particularly the NP. The ANC entered into the constitutional drafting process with a set of constitutional guidelines that it had developed in the 1988 Harare Declaration.2 Many of principles to which the party committed itself in the Declaration fundamentally influenced both the interim and final constitutions, but not all of the ANC’s principles were adopted. Among other points, the guidelines asserted that South Africa should be a unitary state in which sovereignty would be exercised through one central

S O U T H A F R I C A’ S P O L I T I C A L I N S T I T U T I O N S

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legislature, executive, and administration. The executive heading this state should be strong and independent. The ANC also affirmed that South Africans should have the right to vote under a system of universal suffrage based on the principle of one person, one vote, and that all organs of the government should be representative of the people as a whole. Finally, in the Harare Declaration the ANC stated that the South African Constitution should include a Bill of Rights based on the Freedom Charter that guaranteed fundamental human rights of all citizens, respective of race, color, sex, and creed.3 The ANC also supported the creation of a proportional electoral system. During the negotiations process, the ANC came to support a closed-list variant of PR with constitutional prohibitions on defections, specifically because of the centralized control such provisions would create. The belief was that centralizing power in this way would prevent the emergence of regionalist and tribal divisions.4 The PR-list system was also useful not only because it would enable the ANC to get its minority candidates elected, but it would also undercut incentives for opposition parties to court African votes. The usefulness of list-PR to ensure minority representation was already well documented, and the ANC, with access to constitutional experts, knew the benefits. The party also felt that a PR system would prevent minority candidates from seeking support from African voters. According to Mervyn Frost, the ANC knew that “no white or Indian area gave the ANC a majority” and that a constituency-based system would therefore have forced such politicians to seek support from African constituencies.5 Party-list PR, therefore, was in part chosen as a defensive maneuver to deflect attention away from the ANC’s core support base, African voters, and to help the party to minimize potential divisions within its own ranks. The NP had also entered into the negotiations process with a set of specific institutional objectives. The NP’s biggest concern as it headed into the constitutional negotiations was to provide checks on unregulated majority rule. The NP explicitly worried that minority groups, especially Afrikaners, would be persecuted once majoritarian rule had been achieved. Therefore, the constitutional principles offered by the NP stated that domination and abuse of power must be prevented; the party also advocated the maximum devolution of power possible, and stipulated that the provisional constitution must entrench the principles under which the final constitution would be drafted. In contrast to the ANC’s support of a universal bill of rights based on individual rights, the NP wanted the constitution to enshrine group rights. The NP’s vision for postapartheid South Africa also called for a federalist

40


state and provisions for some form of cooperative government between major political entities. Initially, the NP favored a constituency-based electoral system, but eventually came to support the PR system. The NP opposed the antidefection clause and proposed a much less independent executive than that envisioned by the ANC. The remaining influential parties, the IFP and the DP, each had distinct positions on these issues as well. The IFP’s two main points for constitutional negotiations focused on federalism and the status of the Zulu monarchy. Ultimately the IFP did not contribute a great deal to the drafting of either the Interim or final constitution because it walked out of the negotiations process for both when it realized that the real drafting process was taking place through separate, bilateral talks between the ANC and NP. On its part, the small DP opposed the antidefection clause and argued for the implementation of a dual ballot: provincial and national legislatures should each be selected through separate ballot papers. The DP anticipated (accurately as it turned out) that this would encourage voters to select larger parties on the national ballot, and region-specific, smaller parties for the provincial ballot. The ANC and NP had wanted the 1994 elections to be conducted with one ballot for provincial and national assemblies, but once the IFP joined up with the DP to insist on the dual ballot, the larger parties conceded the point. Institutional Outcomes As a result of the constitutional negotiations, postapartheid South Africa became a federal state, with government tiers at the national, provincial, and local levels (though permanent local governments were not elected until 2000). The national tier was vastly more powerful than the provincial administrations, and in practice, the provinces have been relegated to administrative arms of the national government. The electoral system finalized in the 1996 Constitution selected candidates for the national and provincial legislatures through a closed party-list proportional representation electoral system with no absolute minimum threshold for representation in the National Assembly (NA). Local governments were to be elected through a mix of constituency (single member wards based on plurality elections) and party list systems, engineered to preserve overall proportionality. To maintain proportionality in all of the country’s legislative assemblies (national, provincial, and local), the constitution prohibited members of parliament from crossing the floor and switching political allegiance.


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Federation in Principle, Unitary in Practice The 1996 Constitution created a federal government divided into three tiers: national, provincial, and local. Provincial and national governments share many concurrent powers, a system of “cooperative governance” intended to prevent the two tiers of government from developing an adversarial relationship. In practice, the process of deconfliction through cooperative governance has meant that the national tier completely dominates the provincial in all aspects: policy initiatives, taxation, and spending allocations. The local tier was not modified from the structures that had already existed in 1994 until the 2000 local government elections, at which time a new tier of governing structures was created and the transition from apartheid declared complete. As part of the federal system, the 1996 Constitution transformed the upper house of parliament, the Senate, into a body modeled on the German land house (Bundesrat), called the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). The NCOP is composed of delegations from each of the provinces, each of which has a single vote, and it must approve any national legislation pertaining to the provinces and provincial powers. The seemingly ambiguous delineation of power between the provincial and national governments could have worked in favor of the provinces, had they asserted their powers while the country’s political institutions were still fluid. The constitution allocated administrative powers over important areas such as health care, pension payments, education, and housing to the provinces, and they spend approximately two-thirds of the national budget and employ the bulk of the country’s civil servants. Lodge argues that these two facts alone should have provided the provinces with substantial autonomy and power.6 Yet the constitution granted the provinces only a small number of exclusive competencies, allocating concurrent national and provincial jurisdiction over virtually all the important policy areas.7 In addition, provinces were constrained in their policymaking abilities as they had to wait until national legislation had been passed in any of these concurrent jurisdictions before they could generate provincial legislation.8 As a result, between 1994 and 1999, the provincial administrations passed only a small number of laws in severely restricted areas of legislative competence. In the event of conflict between the two, national legislation would hold sway. If the provinces did not have legislative autonomy, then perhaps they could have developed autonomy through the implementation of directives and programs set at the national level. As implementers of the major government delivery programs, the provinces should have

42


had power by virtue of their latitude in interpreting and implementing national policies. But the provinces were so constrained by national “norms and standards” that they could not exercise any discretion in distributing the lump sums they received from the national government. There simply was not enough left for them to decide upon. The national government also tended to impose unfunded mandates on the provinces, taking additional resources away from any priorities the provinces might have tried to establish independent of national priorities. One result of this was that the provinces consistently overspent their budgets.9 Provincial budgets were heavily constrained, leading to further curtailment of their potential autonomy. Aside from the issue of unfunded mandates, provinces could not independently establish their budgets. They faced high fixed costs in the form of the civil service. The sunset clauses of the interim constitution prohibited large-scale layoffs in the civil service, and salaries for all public servants were set through negotiations at the national level.10 Provincial cabinet minister for finance in KwaZulu-Natal, Peter Miller, complained that the biggest financial challenge is to increase money being spent on productive service provision and reduce the amount spent on the civil service. Too much of fixed costs are salaries, wages, pension benefits and medical aid. Actual personnel costs here run into approximately R11-billion. Add to that rates and taxes on buildings and transfer costs to pensioners, and R16-billion of the R17,9- billion budget is gone.11

Further, the provinces had little spending discretion of the funds remaining after fixed costs were paid out. When the national government disbursed the annual budget to the provinces, it established spending priorities that demanded the provinces allocate their spending in very specific categories. This left them little discretionary power to pursue provincially determined priorities. Provincial powers were further limited by their lack of independent revenue bases, as the provinces have almost no power of the purse. Provinces could not tax some of the most lucrative sources of revenue, such as income tax, property tax, sales tax and value-added tax. These were collected by the national government, which then redistributed revenue to the provinces based on population size. Provinces were allowed to impose flat-rate surcharges on the tax bases of any tax, levy, or duty imposed by national legislation, other than those imposed on corporate income tax, value-added tax, and rates on property or customs duties. Yet the provinces could pass their own tax


43

laws only after the National Assembly had passed legislation allowing them to do so, and the National Assembly did not pass this legislation until 2001. The result was that between 1994 and 1999 some provinces passed, but could not implement, tax legislation.12 Even if the provinces had the power to raise their own funds, they may not have been able to make effective use of them. Between 1994 and 1999, provincial administrations were beset by a number of capacity problems, the most severe of which was their inability to manage their finances. When the provinces consistently overran their budgets, they were not allowed to borrow money. Capacity problems also included skill shortages; waste and fraud due to lack of effective control systems; discrimination against the richer provinces in favor of the poorer ones; and the fact that poorer provinces sometimes could not even spend their budgets. The poorest provinces lacked the administrative infrastructure or experience to utilize their budgets, while the richest provinces overran their budgets.13 As late as 1998, provinces were still running into cost overruns estimated at R2 billion.14 Finally, provincial autonomy was actively and directly undermined by the ANC itself, as the party has consistently proven reluctant to devolve genuine power to the provinces. Its actions to undermine the viability of provincial governments should not be surprising, since the party never wanted federalism in the first place. As analyst Barney Mthombothi put it, the ANC has never had any taste for federalism. It favoured a unitary State because it felt such a system would give it the power to change society fairly quickly. It also felt that those favouring federalism simply wanted to perpetuate the homeland system by another name. But having accepted a federal system, the party is, however, reluctant to devolve real power to the regions.15

The party’s resistance to the federal system openly manifested in 1998, when the ANC established a Presidential Review Commission (PRC) to investigate the viability and functioning of the provinces. The report found many problems with provincial governments and recommended that the central government exercise “constant vigilance” over the more troubled provinces, such as the Northern Province and Eastern Cape.16 The PRC led to a debate on whether the government was going to scrap the provincial tier of government altogether, and this ongoing uncertainty about future of the provinces in turn weakened the role of the NCOP, preventing it from

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developing a truly independent and active profile.17 Thus, the scope for provinces to exercise independence diminished even further, and power centralized at the national level. Centralizing Power through Proportional Representation While the centralized federal system focused legislative and administrative power at the center, the electoral system further enhanced the position of national party elites. Elections for both the National Assembly and the provincial parliaments are held concurrently at fiveyear intervals. Reflecting the negotiating positions of the DP and the IFP, voters cast two ballots: one for provincial and the other for national legislatures. The text of the constitution stipulates that the electoral system for the National Assembly and the provinces should be designed by national legislation to result, “in general, in proportional representation.” Elections would be conducted on the basis of a national common voters roll, and there would be a minimum voting age of eighteen.18 While simple in concept, the actual functioning of the list-PR system is rather complex, because the system mixes national and provincial voting districts to select the National Assembly. In Schedule 6, Annexure A, the constitution established that the four hundred seats in the National Assembly should be filled by candidates from both regional and national lists, and that the lists submitted by each party should contain names in fixed order of preference. There are no constitutional prescriptions as to how the parties should compile their candidate lists, leaving the process of list selection to individual parties. Therefore, voters cast ballots for predetermined sets of candidates that each party was required to compile and submit to the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) in advance of the election. These provisions established the basic characteristics of the electoral system: closed-list proportional representation with a twotier allocation of seats. For the two hundred National Assembly seats that are allocated from the national party lists, the entire country serves as one constituency. Parties are allocated seats based on their overall performance on the national ballot, and candidates gain entry based on their position on the party lists (the “national-to-national” lists). The two hundred provincial seats are distributed among the provinces based on provincial population as a percentage of national population. These “provincial-to-national” seats are then allocated among parties based on how the parties performed on the national ballot in each province


45

(rather than how the party fared in the overall national competition or on the ballot for the provincial legislature). Each province effectively becomes a separate voting district in the national election, creating ten districts (the nine provinces plus the national district). There are no subprovincial districts for either provincial or national legislatures. The constitution set a variable threshold to determine which parties should obtain seats in these legislative assemblies. The number of votes a party needs to gain a seat is determined by the number of seats open divided by the number of votes cast in the election. The exact formula for the National Assembly uses the Droop Quota system: it divides the total number of votes cast by the number of seats in the National Assembly, plus one, and the result, plus one, disregarding factions, is the quota of votes per seat (Schedule 6, Section 5 [b]).19 The same procedures are followed for provincial elections. The national seats won from regional allocations are determined by the same method, dividing the number of national seats allocated to the region by the number of national ballots cast in the province. Therefore, the quota of votes per seat will change with each election, and the number of votes needed for each seat decreases as the total votes cast increases. Since the number of votes needed to win a seat depends on the number of votes cast in the election, and the number of seats is large, the effective quota for seats turns out to be extremely low, often just a few thousand votes. Through these factors, parties earning less than 1 percent of the national vote have been able to gain entrance into the National Assembly. In 1994 the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP) was able to gain two seats in the National Assembly with only 0.45 percent of the national vote. In 1999, six parties, each winning under 1 percent of the vote, earned seats in the National Assembly.20 Such a low threshold would seem to reward small parties and enable them to court small constituencies. In fact, the party system did fragment somewhat between 1994 and 1999, as the number of opposition parties in the National Assembly doubled from the first to the second parliaments. The large constituencies and the high number of seats being contested lowered the vote quota per seat, facilitating the representation of smaller parties. Yet this multiplication of parties in parliament did not represent an increase in ethnic parties, as might have been expected, and it coincided with a reduction in the number of influential political parties in parliament—parties large enough to make a difference in parliamentary processes. Furthermore, the degree of fragmentation was relatively small, especially when compared to other countries with pure-PR electoral systems.

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One factor working against party fragmentation was a new policy enacted by the IEC in the 1999 election. The IEC decided to charge parties registration fees of R100,000 (at the time approximately USD 33,000) for the national elections and R20,000 (USD 6,500) for each provincial election, creating barriers to smaller and less wellfunded political parties. As a result, there are far more parties in the country than those that could participate in the electoral process. Most of these small parties do not maintain stable organizations and memberships, but simply register with the IEC as political entities. The ANC also instilled centralizing pressures in some parts of the electoral system to counteract the fragmentary pressures. True to the prediction that the closed-list PR system centralizes power in the parties, political accountability in the South African parties runs upward to party leaders, rather than downward to constituents. This helped to diminish the cultivation of local power bases by political entrepreneurs, as they could not risk earning the ire of powerful party members. Party central executives exercised, in the words of one analyst, “life or death control” over party members.21 As a result, the combined effects of the electoral system stifled debate within parliament, especially within the ranks of the ANC. ANC members of parliament (MPs), anxious to retain favor with party elites, rarely criticized party decisions, even when highly controversial and hotly debated outside of parliament. Those who did criticize the party outside of internal structures, such as Bantu Holomisa, found themselves expelled.22 The relative ease of gaining representation and the absence of an electoral threshold also removed incentives for parties to work together to form electoral coalitions, so that a number of parties continued to mobilize on almost identical platforms, competing with each other rather than joining forces to unite their constituencies. Proportional Representation in a Context of Centralized Power In operation, the federal system has intensified the nationalizing pressures established by the electoral system. When combined with the concurrent scheduling of provincial and national elections, pure-PR elections held in large provincial and national districts, this institutional structure built enormous incentives to organize nationally, and little reward to mobilize on local or provincial bases.23 The weak status and uncertain future of provinces made them less attractive arenas for political contestation. To influence most important policies and gain access to patronage resources, parties needed to have enough members of parliament to force the ANC to take their viewpoints into consideration. Parliamentary practice between 1994


47

and 1999 had made the opposition parties realize that, given the ANC’s dominant electoral position, policies were formulated within ANC party caucuses and brought to the floor for debate that was often heated, but ultimately symbolic. If the parties wanted to wrest any control from the ANC, they would have to increase their representation in the National Assembly. In the South African context, there are very few social groups large enough to provide electoral support capable of delivering the results needed for this magnitude of representation in the National Assembly. Therefore, parties came to value large-scale representation at the national level as the top priority, shaping all other electoral priorities to advance this overarching goal. Thus, the weak federal structure raised the most important contestation of power up to the national level, rather than the provincial or local. As we see in the next section, most ethnic groups in South Africa were too small to constitute a support base that could help a party win enough seats to make an impact in the National Assembly, and so the centralizing tendencies of the candidate list and federal system counteracted the fragmentary pressures of the electoral system. The Structure of Social Divisions These institutional constellations have interacted with an extremely complex society. South Africans are divided by race, ethnicity, class, religion, region, and language. Most of these groups are too small to be politically important in the context of these nationalized institutional incentives. Faced with political institutions that significantly centralized power at the national tier, confronting the electoral strength of the ANC, and desiring to remain influential during the critical fist ten years of democratic South Africa, parties sought to remain politically relevant by securing large-scale representation in a short amount of time. Ethnic mobilization would not have met the parties’ goals, and therefore did not become an attractive option for political elites. Accordingly, the political importance of ethnicity and its potential to incite conflict have declined. Ethnicity is alive and well at the social level; it just has not been imbued with political salience. Objective Differences: Race and Ethnicity What are these social identities to which we are referring? What separates a racial from an ethnic group, and how do they interrelate? In the South African context, race and ethnicity refer to separate concepts. Race groups refer to the four population categories established by the apartheid policies of the former government: black (used interchangeably

48


with African) refers to people belonging to groups indigenous to the territory; Coloureds are those of mixed ancestry (Khoi, San, African, white, Malay, Chinese, etc.); Indians refers to people of South Asian descent; and whites are the descendants of Europeans settlers (see table 3.1).24 Whereas racial categories are based on a combination of ancestry and physical characteristics, ethnic distinctions encompass communities grouped by cultural and linguistic differences. Thus, English, Xhosa, Afrikaner, and Zulu are all ethnic groups (see table 3.1a). The four race groups are each internally differentiated, with significant class or identity-based divisions within the group, and ethnic groups generally fall within the four overarching racial categories. Tables 3.1 and 3.1a

Racial and Ethnolinguistic Groups in South Africa

Racial Groups (3.1)

Black

White

Coloured

Indian

Total

76.7%

10.9%

8.9%

2.6%

100%

Ethnolinguistic Groups (3.1a) Zulu

22.9%

9,200,144

Xhosa

17.9%

7,196,118

Afrikaner

14.4%

5,811,547

Pedi

9.2%

3,695,846

English

8.6%

3,457,467

Tswana

8.2%

3,301,774

Sotho

7.7%

3,104,197

Tsonga

4.4%

1,756,105

Swazi

2.5%

1,013,193

Venda

2.2%

876,409

Ndebele

1.5%

586,961

Other

0.6%

228,275

31,127,631

4,434,697

3,600,446

1,045,596

40,583,573

Total:

100%

40,583,573

Source: 1996 census. Ethnicity is measured by home language here (the South African census asks only for home language); there are no independent categories for Indian and Coloured in table 3.1a. Most Indians fall in the “English” category, while Coloureds are split between Afrikaners and English. The shaded portions in table 3.1a indicate the ethnic groups that fall within the black racial group. This information is based on the 1996 census rather than the 2001 census because the former represents the demographic structure at the midpoint of the period under analysis in this work.


49

Black South Africans The category “black South Africans” can refer to several groups. It is sometimes used synonymously with “African” to connote the descendants of the indigenous peoples who lived in the territory comprising current South Africa before the European settlers arrived and who were classified as “natives” by the British and Dutch colonial administrations. When not capitalized, “black” can refer to the black Consciousness political definition of the term, and includes all the groups oppressed during apartheid: African, Coloured, and Indian. In current South African phrasing, this group tends most often to be referred to by the phrase “previously disadvantaged.” The African/black (hereafter interchangeably called black South African or black) group includes the Zulu, Xhosa, Pedi, Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, Swazi, Tswana, Venda, Ndbele, Tsonga, the Khoi, and the San peoples (the last two are often lumped together as Khoi-San or “bushmen,” but in reality are two distinct groups). When not asking people to self-identify their ethnic group, surveys that delineate between the members of these groups use the criteria of home language to assign people into ethnic categories (this is the categorization used in table 3.1a). Under this definition of black as being indigenous African, blacks make up 76.7 percent of the population.25 They constitute the overwhelming majority in every province except for the Northern Cape (where they are only 33.2 percent of the population) and the Western Cape (20.9 percent). Using home language as a proxy for ethnic identification, the largest ethnic group within black South Africans is the Zulu, followed by Xhosa, Pedi, Tswana, and Sotho. Of the African ethnic groups, then, Zulus are the ones whose mobilization as an identity group should prove most rewarding in the electoral arena, as a political party that succeeds in securing most of their loyalties can win upward of 20 percent of the national vote. The other national languages are each spoken by less than 6 percent of black South Africans as their home language. These ethnic groups have a long history of separation as well as interaction.26 With the exception of the Khoi and the San, the indigenous inhabitants of Southern Africa all belong to the linguistic family of Bantu languages. Bantu-speaking groups divide further into two major linguistic subgroups: Nguni and Sotho language families. The Nguni languages (isiXhosa, isiZulu, isiNdebele, and siSwati) are all closely related, and speakers of the languages can understand each other to a significant degree. The Nguni tribes migrated further south into the region than the Sotho speakers, and thus reside primarily in

50


the southern and southwestern regions of South Africa that border the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The family of Sotho language speakers encompasses the Northern Sotho, Southern Sotho, and Tswana ethnic groups. Unlike the Zulu and Xhosa, Sotho groups span national borders: the populations of Lesotho and Botswana are virtually 100 percent Sotho and 80 percent Tswana, respectively.27 Sotho languages are not mutually intelligible with the Nguni languages, nor are their social customs very similar to those of Nguni speakers. The Sotho language groups together comprise a far smaller proportion of the total South African population than do the Nguni speakers, and hence their languages are much less prominent in national affairs. Despite superficial differences, most of these groups had more in common than in contrast. Most of the groups tended to value cattle, mixed agriculture with hunting, and traced ancestry through patrilineal systems of descent. There are significant cultural differences, especially with regard to exogamy rules, initiation rites, and food taboos, but overall, the differences between the Sotho- and Ngunispeaking communities have been neither sharp nor unbridgeable.28 Outside of the major urban townships, apartheid’s effort to create ethnic homelands has physically separated these groups, so that today there are distinct rural areas that are generally monoethnic, and many cities tend to be populated primarily by one ethnic group (the exception is Johannesburg). Zulus and Xhosas fought bitter battles in mining hostels throughout the 1980s and early ‘90s, though the extent to which that was genuinely ethnic rather than political is suspect. Regardless, the point is that there is material both to manufacture a myth of commonality as well as one of difference, which could be used to mobilize either perceptions of ethnic difference or racial unity. White South Africans The competition between the two main groups that comprise white South Africa, the English, and the Afrikaners, drove much of the country’s history from its founding to the end of apartheid. The long history of rivalry and domination between these groups includes several wars over territory, the Great Trek of the Afrikaners from the Cape to the highveld of Johannesburg, and deep-rooted issues grounded in the economic, cultural, and linguistic dominance of the English over Afrikaners. While most whites in South Africa are members of either the Afrikaner or English groups, there also exist several immigrant communities that have retained distinct cultural identities,


51

most notably the Greek and Portuguese. Within the English-speaking group, Jewish South Africans exist as a distinct subset, with their own history and attendant stereotypes separate from the mainstream English identity. However, these groups are so small that they are rarely treated separately from English or Afrikaans speakers in academic or public discourse, nor do they present large enough groups to be attractive politically. English- and Afrikaans-speaking whites have distinct political, social, and cultural histories, which relate to important divisions within the white community and the origins of the apartheid system.29 The historical separation between the two groups was so extreme as to represent an empirical realization of the ideal type of the segmented, plural society. English-speaking white South Africans are primarily the descendants of British colonizers and European immigrant groups that adopted the English language, while Afrikaners descend from a mixture of Dutch, French, German, and English immigrants. From the end of the Anglo-Boer War until 1948, when the Nationalist Party won control of the government, the English were politically and socially dominant over the Afrikaners. English was the sole national language and elite social circles were Anglophonedominated. The English were dominant economically as well: in the early 1950s all the mines were owned by English, and most of the civil service was composed of English speakers. Prior to Nationalist rule, the South African government directed a policy of Anglicization against Afrikaners in the Transvaal region, contributing to the tensions and hierarchical relations between the two groups (and to the formation of a militant Afrikaner nationalism). The Afrikaner group, in contrast, was a more deliberately constructed and distinct cultural community than the English, and the creation of what is currently understood as the Afrikaner ethnic identity actually developed in competition with other interpretations of Afrikaner identity.30 Early Afrikaner community and political leaders intentionally manipulated cultural identities to strengthen a specific definition of what it meant to be an Afrikaner. A central element in the development of the Afrikaner ethnic identity was the creation of Afrikaans, a language deliberately produced through the mixture of Dutch, German, and French, to emphasize the “Africanization” of the European settlers as they became “Afrikaaners” (literally, Africans).31 The Afrikaner identity was also constructed through the mythologizing of seminal and often traumatic events such as the Battle of Blood River, the Anglo-Boer War (now called the South African War), and the Great Trek.32

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Coloured South Africans The validity of the categorization of South Africans into black, white, Coloured, and Indian is often questioned, but never so much as when discussing Coloured South Africans. Nearly 9 percent of South Africans are considered Coloured (8.9 percent; 3,600,446), and more than half of them live in the Western Cape province. Approximately 80 percent of the Coloured population speak Afrikaans as a first language; the remainder speak English, and the linguistic division roughly coincides with a lower-class versus middle-class categorization. Western Cape Coloureds have an identity distinct from those residing in other parts of the country, in large part because they are the most populous group in the province. Of all the racial and ethnic groups in South Africa, Coloureds are the most artificially manufactured by the old apartheid regime. The category “Coloured” was introduced through decades of colonial and apartheid legislation, when faced with the problem of how to deal with people who were not “racially pure”—not entirely European, African, or Asian (Indian). Therefore, an official category for people of mixed racial ancestry was created.33 While the most common assumption about Coloureds is that they are the offspring of Europeans and Africans, the group also includes many people of Malaysian, Chinese, Khoi, San, and Griqua descent. As a result, the concept of Coloured identity is hotly contested, and the debate begins as soon as one introduces the term: should it be placed within quotation marks (“Coloured”); should the initial “c” be capitalized or not; should the term be preceded by the term “so-called” (as in so-called Coloured)? People debate whether the category of Coloured counts as an ethnic or racial grouping as well. These issues point to an area of great debate within and beyond the Coloured community: have Coloureds developed an identity that signifies some sense of commonality and cultural uniqueness, or is it a racial group with a false consciousness fabricated by the apartheid state? Indian South Africans The Indian South Africans are the fourth and smallest racial group defined by apartheid policies. Indians constitute 2.6 percent of the population and 3 percent of the voting public.34 Often perceived as a unified community, Indian South Africans are as diverse as the other groups already discussed. Class and religious subdivides most prominently cleave Indian South Africans into distinct subgroups. First, a strong class divide exists in Indian consciousness and living styles that has become more developed during the postapartheid era.


53

One the one hand, as apartheid was dismantled, middle-class Indians were positioned to take quick advantage of the new access to amenities and facilities. Many had the skills and education that Coloureds and Africans lacked, and therefore could take advantage of new employment opportunities faster than their black brethren. On the other hand, there remained an Indian working class, whose existence has been threatened by their uncertain position in the postapartheid era. Lacking the education and skills of their middle-class counterparts, working-class Indians must now compete with Coloureds and Africans for unskilled jobs and they feel threatened by affirmative action policies that promise employment to Africans at their expense. The living conditions of the Indian lower classes are similar to those found in poor, urban African townships. The other main dividing line in the Indian community is religious: 62 percent of Indians in South Africa are Hindu, 19 percent are Muslim, and 13 percent are Christians. These distinctions do not generate conflict within the Indian community in South Africa, though social relations between the various groups tend to be cool, and Hindus brought with them caste stratification from India.35 There are also significant language distinctions: Tamil is the most prevalent language, but Indian South Africans also speak Hindi, Gujarati, Urdu, and Telegu. Each of these racial groups contains within itself a range of competing identities, some of which have been mobilized in the past and others that have the potential for mobilization in the future. Each racial and ethnic group contains a continuum between rich and poor, educated and uneducated, and workers and professionals, and there are region-specific identities that cut across all of these. The extent of the differentiation varies from group to group, but it is there nonetheless. There is sufficient ethnic, class, and linguistic division within each of the race groups to provide ample material for political mobilization, yet parties have been slow to take advantage of these opportunities. Subjective Social Cleavages One potential answer to this mobilization puzzle could be that the mere presence of group divisions does not mean that people identify with them. In other words, perhaps objective and subjective cleavages do not coincide: political parties have not sought to mobilize ethnic divisions because these are simply not relevant to the daily life of South Africans. In Claggett et al.’s terminology, perhaps ethnic groups are not “fundamental” cleavages, not socially salient. This

54


logic makes two major assumptions: (1) that political elites are not capable of manipulating social divides to increase the importance of certain lines of identification over others, and (2) that the lack of ethnic politics, and the supposed prevalence of racial politics, are due to the fact that racial identities dominate all other social sources of identity. Both of these are incorrect. First, as discussed in the introduction, political elites in many countries have long been able to activate latent cleavages and to elevate divisions that previously had not been considered important. There is no reason to expect that elites in South Africa could not mimic their peers in Africa and elsewhere. Second, there simply is no dominance of race over other competing identities in South Africa, both are salient, even subjectively. When asked in an open-ended question to indicate the primary groups with which they identify, only 22 percent of South Africans reported racial categories, with more South Africans reporting their ethnic groups (29 percent) and almost as many citing religion (19 percent) as race (table 3.2).36 The high salience of religion, third overall, was notable, especially because of its nonpoliticization in national politics. When looking within the four race groups, the patterns of selfidentification reveal significant differences: blacks, whites, Coloureds and Indians each show a different pattern for the self-identification question. Table 3.3 presents responses to the self-identification question broken down by race group. Among black and Indian South Africans, ethnic group affiliations were significantly stronger than race-based identification, with the exact opposite trend emerging from the Coloured group (for Table 3.2

Self-Identification of South Africans

Ethnic Group Race Religion Class Occupation Miscellaneous Refused Missing All Respondents, N=2200

29.2 % 21.5 % 19.3 % 12.0 % 3.5 % 17.8 % 0.2 % 7.9 %

Note: Open-ended question: “Besides being South African, which group do you feel you belong to?” Data collected by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa Idasa in July– August 2000 in the South African component of the Southern African Barometer project.

55


Table 3.3

Self-Identification within Racial Groups Black

Coloured

Ethnic Category

37.2%

Race Religion Class Occupation N=1665

18.4% 18.2% 4.0% 3.6%

White Ethnic Category Race Religion Class Occupation N=301

9.2% 15.1% 11.2% 48.6% 4.6%

Ethnic Category Race Religion Class Occupation N=179 Indian Ethnic Category Race Religion Class

0.5% 46.7% 28.8% 17.0% 1.7%

65.5% 0.9% 16.2% 6.0%

N=55

Coloureds, language affiliation was determined to fall within the ethnic category, while the answer “Coloured” was coded as racial). This means that ethnic mobilization should have been most easily achieved in these groups than in any other, yet political parties have attempted to mobilize these groups the least of any other ethnic groups in South Africa. Class was the dominant identity for white South Africans, which helps to explain why the DA could issue classbased campaign rhetoric that resonated with members of this group. Religion scored highly among all groups; within both Coloured and Indian respondents it was the second most prevalent identification. For whites and blacks, religion came in third: behind ethnicity and race for blacks, and behind class and race among white respondents. These results are not just an artifact of a snapshot view of social identities. The salience of race actually decreased after the transition, while the importance of culture increased. In a study of South African perceptions of social identity, University of Stellenbosch Professor Hennie Kotzé asked respondents to classify themselves into categories that included race, ethnicity language, culture, and religion. Kotzé compared responses between 1994 and 1996, and found that the largest category of self-identification was racial, with 35.7 percent of the sample seeing themselves in terms of race.37 At the same time, Kotzé found that levels of cultural identification and the importance of cultural values had increased between 1994 and 1996, and that the change was primarily due to increases in this dimension among black respondents.38 A comparison of the 1996 data to the 2000 data shows

56


that the incidence of race as a source of personal identity actually decreased at a time when many have argued that the politicization of racial divisions increased. One of the drawbacks of the decontextualized, single-item selfidentification question is that it misses the multilayered aspect of personal identity. One way to investigate potential fluidities in identities is demonstrated by a question in the survey results reported by Kotzé. In his survey, Kotzé also asked respondents to evaluate whether they had anything in common with various groups based on specific language, occupation, race, urban/rural, and religious groups. This gets at a situational aspect of group identity, without explicitly asking for self-identification. Even here, however, the primacy of ethnic identities within the black group surfaced again. Corresponding to the increased levels of ethnic awareness, black respondents reported that they had the most in common with African people, Zulus, and Xhosas. The trends for Coloureds and Indians also reinforced the ethnic over racial identities, while white respondents now showed a greater racial than class identification. Whites reported they had the most in common with other white people and white Afrikaans speakers, while both Coloureds and Indians felt they had the most in common with other Coloured and Indian people, respectively. For both of these last groups, the second largest category of people with whom respondents felt they had the most in common were members of their own religious or traditional belief group.39 This information helps to extract some of the multidimensional aspects of identity, but it is still a decontextualized question asked in a survey, with all the attendant weaknesses of such an approach. The South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR) has taken a different approach to finding out the relevance of race and race relations in everyday life. In 2001, the SAIRR asked 2144 South Africans about the problems they encountered in everyday life, and found that most people did not spontaneously cite race relations and racism among the top problems that they confront daily.40 Only when interviewers primed race, when they explicitly asked people about race and racism in isolation from social and economic issues, did respondents identify race as a major problem. Furthermore, far fewer Africans considered racism a major problem than Afrikaans-speaking whites. The SAIRR also found that half of the respondents felt that race relations have improved in recent years, while only 25 percent believed they had deteriorated. This indicates that in the everyday experience of South Africans, race and racism, and by implication racial consciousness, were not as significant as unemployment, crime, and poverty (implying that issues of class


57

consciousness should resonate with voters).41 One cannot, therefore, argue that racialized politics dominates ethnic politics, or that parties do not attempt to mobilize ethnic divisions because party elites think that these identities do not matter to ordinary South Africans. Interactive Factors: Group Size, Distribution, and Class Position Analyses of South African politics since 1994 have been consumed with debates over whether election results amount to racial censuses. Some argue that South Africans vote simply for people in their ethnic or racial category, and that election results merely mirror the demographic divisions in society.42 This is the simplest answer to why there is little ethnic mobilization in South Africa: it has been trumped by primordial racial mobilization. The first problem with this conclusion is empirical: most parties did not actually seek to mobilize race groups. Several may have seemed to mobilize race, but that stems from a near complete overlap of racial and class group boundaries during the first decade of democracy. Second, the racial census theory assumes that voters support racially bounded parties out of primordial attachments, when in fact such voting patterns may actually reflect expressive and interest-based calculations of preference. Third, and most importantly, the entire discussion of the racial census idea disregards the fundamental issue that there is no objective primacy of racial over ethnic or other identities, and therefore one must explain why race seems, to some, to have been a more compelling mobilization strategy than these others. The argument here is relatively simple and yet overlooked: there are too many ethnic groups and each one is too small to make basing an electoral strategy on its mobilization, an effective tool to win representation at the national tier. This last fact in and of itself was enough to guarantee that ethnic groups did not become the targets of exclusive political mobilization. Racial groups are much larger, and when combined, can constitute approximately 25 percent of the vote. Therefore, courting the “minority vote” had the potential to deliver short-term benefits, but only if the coalition was multiracial. Why should it be difficult to distinguish between racial and classbased appeals? At the point when South Africa transitioned to majoritarian rule, decades of apartheid policy had ensured that each racial group, by and large, occupied a distinct position in the socioeconomic hierarchy. By the end of the first decade, black empowerment programs had begun to lessen the overlap between race and class in

58


the highest tiers, yet the majority of South Africans still fell into distinct racial and class groups. This division was never complete, but was large enough to make it seem as if appealing to certain class interests was a way to make cloaked racial appeals. For example, consider the relationship between race and occupation. Figure 3.1 groups South Africans according to occupational categories roughly corresponding to class groups. Each tier has then been divided into its racial composition, after which it becomes obvious how Africans cluster in the lower rank, while the professional class is over 50 percent white. These trends, demonstrating a sharp racial basis to class position, are reproduced in education, income, and other socioeconomic measures. Each of the four race groups occupies a distinct position in the country’s socioeconomic structure. This positioning generates similar material interests to each group, making them easily mobilized, large blocs of potential supporters. The least educated, those employed in the least skilled occupations, and those earning the lowest wages are all disproportionately African.43 Class composition becomes more diverse as class rank increases, yet even so the highest tier, the most educated, most highly skilled and highest paid, is disproportionately composed of white South Africans. While this data is from the 1996 census, the trends have only become more extreme since then. Despite the emergence of a small black middle and upper class since the early 100 Percentage of Population Group

90 80 70 60

White

50

Indian Coloured

40

Black

30 20 10 0 Elementary

Artisan/ Operator

Clerical/ Service

Professional/ Technical/ Managerial Occupational Categories

Figure 3.1 Racial Composition of Workforce, 1996

Total


59

1990s, most Africans have actually become even more impoverished since the early 1990s.44 As a result, this overlap of class and race created large communities, delimited by race, that share many common characteristics. This makes it difficult to distinguish between interest or class-based mobilization and racial mobilization, as the group boundaries often coincide. Therefore, when discussing strategies of mobilization (as distinct from the logic of vote choice), it often becomes easy to claim that a party, when appealing to wealthy or educated interests, was just appealing to the racial minority groups, and that parties that sought to represent the poor were courting blacks. Many consider the classbased rhetoric of the DP and DA to be cloaked racial appeals, and charge that the party is racist as a result. The debate is not one that is likely to be resolved, as it becomes a matter of opinion. The difference between a party mobilizing race through racial rhetoric as opposed to mobilizing race through class discourse is significant, however. Using class as a proxy for race, if that is indeed what parties such as the DP/DA do, avoids the reification of racial identities and attitudes and allows the party more flexibility in the support base it constructs. As more blacks, Coloureds, and Indians become wealthy, they could find the class-based rhetoric of a party such as the DA appealing, while they would never align themselves to a party that issued race-based rhetoric. By using class and interest-based rhetoric, parties can mobilize race to some degree, but also defend themselves against charges of racism and leave room for voters to evolve into natural supporters. The fluidity and combinability of social groups in the country, layered onto the complex web of linguistic, cultural, racial, regional, and religious identities, provided a wide array of options for mobilization. Conclusion Ethnicity has not become politicized because it is not electorally rewarding. Without a supply of ethnic mobilization, there was no risk of divisive ethnic competition and violence. South Africa’s political institutions, chosen for political expediency, had the side effect of promoting centrist parties and ethnic peace. Factors of social demography dramatically impacted electoral mobilization. To echo Posner’s findings in Zambia,45 in South Africa each of the ethnic groups constituted a relatively small portion of the overall population (table 3.1 and 3.1a), and therefore were not important when the relative political unit became the national tier.

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This is the crux of how political institutions interact with social structures to mitigate against ethnic mobilization in South Africa. If parties were contesting in the local elections, then ethnic groups could serve as viable units to construct a minimum winning coalition, and we should expect to see some level of ethnic mobilization at the local level. Because the most intense political competition in South Africa takes place at the national tier, bypassing provincial, exclusive ethnic mobilization would not guarantee enough support to win a party significant levels of representation (assuming, of course, that a particular party could even win all the votes from the ethnic group’s members). Even though the proportional electoral system did help small ethnic, regional, or religious parties to gain entrance into provincial and national legislatures, most parties in South Africa were not satisfied with contesting politics on the small scale. Instead, they desired to challenge the ANC at the national level. Given the national focus of power and the ANC’s huge majority in the national parliament, winning just a few seats did not cede a party any real power in the National Assembly. Parties such as the Freedom Front, Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), and ACDP, all of which had seven or fewer members in parliament between 1994 and 2004, barely made any impact on national policymaking. Therefore, to win enough seats to have any influence on policy in the National Assembly, when generating campaign strategies, most parties eschewed small-scale mobilizations and ran campaigns aiming for nationwide support and large electoral returns. The logic of this argument is simple, but it has not been applied to South Africa or many of the currently democratizing states around the world, in which democratization has triggered the mobilization of large ethnic groups, leading to violence. Decades of federal engineering in Nigeria demonstrated how political parties would mobilize on different identity platforms, depending on whether they were mobilizing in a two-way contest between north and south, a threeway contest between three regions, or a competition that had to take place through more than twenty separate states.46 Political mobilization evolved from a North-South, Muslim-Christian axis in the First Republic, to a Hausa/Fulani-Yoruba-Igbo competition during the Second Republic, to a much more complex and multiethnic mobilization process once the states were introduced in the Third and Fourth Republics. In South Africa, parties have assessed the political arena, deemed the national tier most important, and therefore turned away from ethnic mobilization in both national and provincial elections. Ethnic


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groups were too small to present lucrative political support bases to parties concerned with winning influence at the national level. As a result, virtually no party sought to activate any of the divisions that either crosscut the race groups or had the potential to reach into the support base of the ANC. Proving this argument is the task of the four case study chapters that follow.


Chapter 4

Electoral Politics in South Africa, 1994—2004

O

n 14 April, 2004, South Africans voted in their third democratic national and provincial elections. The exercise demonstrated that the institutionalization of democracy in South Africa was well under way and that politics were normalizing to an extent comparable to established democracies. In contrast to the politically tense and violent situation that attended the 1994 election, the 2004 electoral process was calm. Aside from a few incidents in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) province, there was little politically motivated violence and the remaining issues revolved around the technical aspects of electoral administration. To many South Africans, for whom the memories of the vibrant transition in 1994 were still fresh, electoral politics in 2004 seemed dull. One of the factors contributing to this seemingly unexciting electoral process was the fact that the probable outcome was known well before the first ballot had been cast. There was no doubt that the ruling African National Congress (ANC) would retain its position and dominate the next government. The main questions were: How large would be the ANC’s margin of victory? Would the ANC gain control over all nine provincial administrations? Would the opposition fragment or consolidate behind a few parties? By the evening of April 15, the answers to these questions became apparent: the ANC was heading towards winning a two-thirds majority, won control over all nine provinces, with the opposition remaining as fragmented as it had become after the 1999 election. When all the votes were tallied, the ANC won 279 out of the 400 seats in the National Assembly (NA), increasing its dominant position in South African politics. On the other side of the benches, the opposition failed to band together behind a few larger parties, and returned to

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parliament with 13 parties sharing 121 seats in the 400-strong lower house of parliament. The Democratic Alliance (DA) performed well and increased its support above the levels that its predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP) had reached in 1999, yet failed to reach the 30 percent threshold that it had projected it would attain along with its alliance partners. The DA was the only opposition party that increased its representation in the NA by more than one seat. The New National Party (NNP) experienced a devastating defeat as it saw its national support decline to less than two percent. As the results came in on election night, many pronounced the NNP dead. By August 2004, they were proven right, when NNP leader Marthinus van Schalkwyk announced that the party would disband in the following year. Ten years after the advent of democracy in South Africa, the architect of apartheid had decided to close up shop. Partisan and Electoral Trends 1994–2004 South Africa transitioned from minority rule under the repressive apartheid regime to a democratic, majoritarian democracy in 1994, led by the most prominent of the liberation movements, the ANC.1 Since then, the country has embarked on an ambitious program of economic, political, and social transformation and reconstruction. At the same time, South African politics has become ever increasingly dominated by the ruling party, as it has consolidated its hold on both houses in the national legislature, provincial governments, the executive branch, and all government agencies. The party also dominates in the nongovernmental sector, as many current civic leaders and NGO heads cut their teeth during the 1980s as leaders in the United Democratic Front (UDF), which had been the internal wing of the ANC during the antiapartheid struggle. While not formally part of the ANC, these leaders retain strong loyalties and ties to the ruling party. During the postapartheid era, no other political parties have succeeded in launching a credible, widespread, and significant challenge to the ruling party. The ANC’s dominance of the electoral arena, public domain, and political debate has steadily increased since 1994 at both national and provincial levels. The country has held three sets of national and provincial elections (1994, 1999, and 2004; see table 4.1), three sets of local elections (1995–1996, 2000, and 2005), each of which has been more professionally managed and peaceful than the last. Each election also demonstrated the increasing dominance of the ANC along with the withering of ethnic mobilization and violence.

National Election Results, 1994–2004 Votes

ACDP AEB ANC AZAPO DA FA FF+ ID IFP MF NNP PAC UCDP UDM Other Valid Votes

Percentage of Votes

Seats

1994

1999

2004

1994

1999

2004

1994

1999

2004

88,104 – 12,237,655 – 338,426 – 424,555 – 2,058,294 13,433 3,983,690 243,478 – – 145,683 19,533,498

228,975 46,292 10,601,330 27,257 1,527,337 86,704 127,217 – 1,371,477 48,277 1,098,215 113,125 125,280 546,790 28,866 15,977,142

250,272 – 10,880,915 39,116 1,931,201 – 139,465 269,765 1,088,664 55,267 257,824 113,512 117,792 355,717 113,161 15,612,671

0.45 – 63.12 – 1.75 – 2.19 – 10.62 0.07 20.55 1.26 – – – 100

1.43 0.29 66.35 0.17 9.56 0.54 0.80 – 8.58 0.30 6.87 0.71 0.78 3.42 0.20 100

1.60 – 69.69 0.27 12.37 – 0.89 1.73 6.97 0.35 1.65 0.73 0.76 2.28 0.75 100

2 – 252 – 7 – 9 – 43 – 82 5 0 – – 400

6 1 266 1 38 2 3 – 34 1 28 3 3 14 – 400

7 – 279 1 50 – 4 7 28 2 7 3 3 9 400

Note: The results were obtained from the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) at www.elections.org.za, and Andrew Reynolds, “The Results,” in Election ‘99 South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki (Cape Town: David Philip; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). DA results reported for 1994 and 1999 are results of the DA’s predecessor, the Democratic Party (DP).

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Table 4.1

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In 2004, the ANC attained its goal of securing complete control over the national and provincial levels of government, winning over two-thirds of the seats in the National Assembly and the power to form the government in all nine provinces. 2 The ANC increased its share of the national vote to almost 70 percent, won a plurality of votes in all nine provinces, and a majority in seven. In the two provinces where the party did not win an outright majority, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, the ANC gained control of the provincial government through coalitional arrangements. Within a week of the election, the party announced the names of all nine provincial premiers.3 In contrast to the ANC’s consolidating hold on the electorate, the opposition’s share of the vote has steadily declined since 1994, and while it fragmented between 1994 and 1999, there was a slight consolidation in 2004. Within this broad trend, there is a difference between the first and second parliaments, the 1994–1999 and 1999–2004 periods. The 1994 to 1999 period saw the number of parliamentary opposition parties double (from six to twelve), though declining from their approximately 37 percent of the vote in 1994 to 33 percent in 1999. Between 1999 and 2004 the number of represented parties held relatively steady, but they shared an even smaller proportion of the vote (30 percent), and the seats grouped under one opposition party, the DA. As a result of these two trends, the largest opposition party elected to the third parliament in 2004 (the DA, with fifty seats) had 39 percent fewer seats than the largest opposition party in the first parliament elected in 1994 (the NP, which had earned eighty-two seats). In 1994 the NP, at the time the largest opposition party, held 55 percent of the opposition seats in the lower house; in 1999 the largest party held 25 percent of the opposition seats (the DP, with ten seats), and in 2004 the reconsolidation gave the DA 42 percent of the opposition seats in the NA. The DA, as the largest opposition party, had been promising since early 1997 that the party had a long-term strategy of breaking into the “black vote.” During the 1999 election campaign the DP reported that it would make inroads into this bloc in 2004, but the party seems to have won the support of only a tiny percentage of this population group.4 Although the DP, renamed the DA in 2001, became the “official opposition” in six provinces in 2004, it did not earn this position by cultivating a broad support base that reflects the diversity of South African society.5 The party’s support remained overwhelmingly urban and was confined primarily to minority-group voters (i.e., white, Indian, and Coloured). The DA lost a great deal of the Indian

E L E C T O R A L P O L I T I C S 19 9 4 – 2 0 0 4

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vote it had earned in 1999, but picked up a fair amount of Coloured voters who jumped ship from the sinking NNP. In 2004 the DA seemed to have won virtually all the moderate white Afrikaans and liberal English votes. Despite proclamations of becoming an alternative to the ANC, the DA remained a minority, conservative, urbanbased opposition party. Whether this would prove a base from which to broaden out remained as doubtful after 2004 as it did before the election. Other trends among the opposition saw the NNP decimated: its share of the national poll reduced to just 1.7 percent, down from 6.9 percent in 1999 and 20.6 percent in 1994. The party that had dominated South African politics for fifty years was represented in only two provincial legislatures, and by September 2005 had dissolved. A number of small parties managed to hold on to or slightly increase their representation in the NA: the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), the African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), the Minority Front (MF), the United Christian Democratic party (UCDP) and the Freedom Front Plus (FF+). Several of these are small yet strong in particular regions: the MF in KwaZuluNatal, the UCDP in Northwest, and the ACDP in the Western Cape. In these provinces, these parties have often played important roles in coalition building and government control, though none of them are significant players on the national tier. While after 2004 there was representation of small parties in South African politics, it could be debated whether this was an artifact of the electoral system or representative of a genuine wish for diversity on the part of South Africans. What could not be debated is the fact that ethnic and racial parties drastically declined in both number and significance. The major ethnic parties, DP, NNP, and IFP, attempted to shift their appeals onto an ideological or multiethnic tier during this time, and many of the smaller, purely ethnic parties, ceased to exist as credible parties. Incidences of electoral violence, especially between Xhosa and Zulu, drastically declined from 1994 to 2004, and the specter of ethnic violence receded further. This decline in mobilized ethnicity occurred even though politically mobilized ethnic groups could easily have surfaced in postapartheid South Africa, and many had expected them to. As chapter 3 discussed in detail, South African society is divided regionally, ethnically, and racially, and there are huge discrepancies in living conditions and wealth both between and within these groups. The country’s electoral system could easily have made these expectations a reality: South Africa’s proportional representation system has no set threshold and so parties with

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less than 1 percent of the national vote can win seats in the National Assembly. The ability to win representation in the national legislature with such small numbers could very well have encouraged parties to mobilize the small ethnic constituencies spread throughout the country. Despite permissive electoral rules and multiple identity-based divisions, however, the number and influence of ethnic political parties have decreased in the postapartheid era. Not only has South Africa avoided an ethnic implosion, but the level of violence associated with political competition has also drastically declined since the transition in 1993–1994. The important questions then become how and why did South Africa avoid an ethnic conflagration? The ANC’s Dominant Position and Its Influence on Party Politics The process by which the ANC constructed its dominance has deeply shaped the terrain of partisan politics in South Africa. Despite repeated proclamations that the ANC was “guaranteed” to win at electoral periods, the party itself had never really taken this position for granted. The debate on the ANC as a dominant party tends to overlook an important aspect of the phenomenon: becoming a dominant party was not an automatic process, and retaining that position has required effort. The ANC has worked hard to prevent the organization from following in the footsteps of liberation movements throughout Africa that fractured soon after independence in the 1960s and ’70s,6 and many of the mechanisms it employed have limited the incentives for other parties to supply ethnic mobilization The mid-1990s were an arduous time for the ANC as the organization refashioned itself from a liberation movement into a governing party and began the transformation of South African government and society. The past ten years have truly been a test of majority rule, as the ANC has faced myriad challenges, stemming from both within and without the party. Internally, the ANC faced a number of demands. First of all, it had to reconcile divergent organizational cultures. While in exile, the organization had been forced to function in a top-down, hierarchical manner, enforcing strict party discipline. Within South Africa, during the 1980s the UDF had fought the struggle against apartheid as an umbrella body of grassroots organizations that were loosely aligned with the ANC. The UDF, in contrast to the ANC in exile, governed itself through a system of consultation and discussion, as the numerous subunits retained their autonomy.7


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As the ANC and UDF began to merge in the early 1990s, the process of integration created many challenges. Chief among these was a tension between “internals” (UDF activists) and “exiles” (ANC cadres outside South Africa) that still underlies power rivalries within the ranks of the ruling party.8 In addition, once the ANC had won seats in national and provincial governments, it had to fill the positions from its ranks. This left the party apparatus without many of its most talented individuals, as they moved into government positions.9 Therefore, the ANC not only had to reconcile the different internal and exile communities, but it also had to virtually rebuild its organizational structures when active members from the branches were deployed in government positions. At the same time the ANC had to take over a government that had been designed to oppress nonwhites, and turn it into an organization capable of empowering the majority. The liberation-movement-turnedgoverning-party had to transform the apartheid bureaucracy into a civil service that would transform and uplift; manage the demands of a modern, industrial economy and the needs of traditional, smallscale farmers; as well as to confront the problems of endemic poverty, unemployment, underdevelopment, and poor education. In other words, the demands were many and often at odds. The ANC’s efforts to prevent internal factionalism, however, are the ones that have most enduringly and fundamentally facilitated the latency of ethnic mobilization. Throughout the first decade of majority rule, the ANC strategically used its position to reinforce the advantages it had earned in 1994. It used the resources of incumbency to publicize its successes at every electoral period; it used state programs to create an empowered black middle class that owed its position to government policies; and it shaped the functioning of political institutions. In the creation of the constitution and the early years of the new political institutions, the ANC intentionally altered the form and function of the political institutions to reduce the likelihood of ethnic or any other form of mobilization that could threaten the cohesion of the party’s support base. Chapter 5 discusses how the process of creating and standing up the postapartheid political institutions provided the ANC with mechanisms with which it could insulate itself from centripetal pressures, such as an electoral system of proportional representation with closed party lists and a centralized federal system, which focused lines of power and accountability upward to the national leadership. The party took these steps intentionally to minimize the potential for internal factionalism, especially of the ethnic and regional variety,

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and has needed them to quell tensions in several provinces. The dynamics are examined at length in chapter 5 but for now one example will suffice. Prior to the 2004 election the ANC refused to name its premier candidates before election day, and instead nominated people to be “deployed” as premiers three days after the polls. This served several functions: it centralized control, kept radical politicians in line with party leadership directives, and prevented charismatic personalities from developing personalized followings. This is an example of a centralizing tactic designed to focus attention on the party rather than on individuals and their personal struggles for power, and it is a tactic that could be used by any ruling government at a stage when political institutions are still malleable, whether or not the party is as dominant as the ANC was at this time. The ANC has also pursued less formal mechanisms to preserve its status, such as maintaining the strategic alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), called the Tripartite Alliance. Again, these are strategies that are available to any influential party, not just one as dominant as the ANC. The Tripartite Alliance enables the ruling party to internalize and co-opt criticism from the left and provides the ANC with enough ideological flexibility to restrict the organizational ground for opposition parties. It is highly difficult to be a party that is more left than the ANC and its alliance partners while still advancing economic policies that make sense in a globalized capitalist economy.10 Finally, the ANC has frequently contributed to a political discourse that demonizes the opposition as racist and reinforces the social cleavage between blacks and whites. This takes the form of the “two nations” rhetoric that so characterized the party’s 1999 election campaign and many of the speeches made by Thabo Mbeki. The “two nations” thesis proposes that there are two separate groups in South Africa, one rich and white, the other poor and black, and is meant to smooth over all differences within the “black” community and to help it maintain cohesion into the postapartheid era. As we saw in chapter 3, the reality is that the inequalities within just black South Africans outstrip the gap between all whites and all blacks. The ANC’s rhetoric, however, enables it to propagate a popular image of black government versus white opposition that helps to prevent the successful politicization of competing lines of division, especially those based on ethnic and class identities. In addition, if all blacks are seen to be poor and marginalized, then interest group and similar mobilization tactics are also bound to fail. In addition to these long-term strategies, the party runs


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a formidable election machine that brings disaffected supporters back into the fold at election time.11 The electoral performance of the ANC and the process of constructing and maintaining its dominant position have exerted strong influences on the nature of party politics in the country. The tendency to centralize power in the presidency, to strictly enforce party discipline, and to crack down on public dissent outside of party structures are defensive mechanisms to strengthen party unity. The ANC had felt that maintaining the unity of the party against all odds was necessary to initiate and manage the transformation of South African society. Demonizing opposition as racist undermines the content of their critiques, so that the party can more readily ignore them. Centralizing political institutions, one of the major dynamics that underlies the current analysis, made the payoffs of ethnic mobilization so small that no parties sought to supply ethnic politics. Opposition Strategies and Fortunes, 1994–2004 An overview of electoral trends and party politics in South Africa must focus on the choices made by the opposition forces as much as it analyzes the activities of the ruling party. Why have none of the opposition parties mounted a genuine challenge to the ruling party? Why none have been able to break up the massive ANC into competing factions? Before the transition, many expected the opposition to seek to break the ANC into ethnic factions, yet no party has attempted to activate cleavages within the ANC’s very diverse support base. Ironically, the often-maligned dominant position of the ANC bears some credit for these choices of the opposition. To compete with a party as large and influential as the ANC and still have a voice in parliament, an opposition party needed significant levels of representation. Earning just a few seats, as the DP and PAC discovered, made it difficult for a party to obtain influence in the National Assembly. By 1999 parties had adopted strategies based on a logic that aimed to deliver large blocks of seats, and this meant that ethnic constituencies were too small to remain electorally viable. Had the ANC’s presence in parliament been smaller, this dynamic may not have been as compelling. The result is that collectively, the opposition remains a group of parties with leadership and policy platforms that fail to attract a wide range of South African voters. Several trends among opposition parties are worth noting here. First, the decline of the NNP, perhaps the inevitable conclusion for the party that created the apartheid system, sapped the country of its

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strongest, most organized, and most well-resourced opposition party. In 1994, the NP had emerged from the election as the second largest party in parliament, with representation in all nine provincial legislatures. In 1999, the “New” NP was reduced to third position, with its remaining support concentrated primarily in the Western Cape and Northern Cape provinces. Although the party retained members in all nine provincial legislatures, in seven of these its representation was down to three seats or less. In 2004, the NNP’s performance was disastrous. The party won seats in just two provincial legislatures (Western Cape and Northern Cape), and had to share the ranking of the fifth largest party in the NA with the ACDP and a relative newcomer, the Independent Democrats (ID). The NNP’s poor performance can be attributed to many factors, but chief among them is the fact that since 1994 the party has frequently changed its opposition tactics and mobilizing strategy. The NNP’s involvement in a number of coalitions and alliances had confused its image among voters. Early on, the party cooperated with the ANC in the Government of National Unity (GNU), but found it difficult to position itself as an opposition force while in government. After withdrawing from the GNU, the party entered a period of soul searching and debated how to position itself in advance of the 1999 elections. Conservative elements won out, and the party decided to position itself as an ideologically based, Christian-Democratic party that mobilized a multiethnic range of minority voters, rather than to open up and court the African vote. At the same time, the party attempted to shift the boundaries of the Afrikaner identity to be delimited more by language, culture, and religion than by phenotype (i.e., race), and in so doing to accept Coloured South Africans as Afrikaners.12 This effort to alter who is considered an Afrikaner, however, met with limited success, as did the party’s attempt to build a multiethnic constituency. In its move to evolve into an ideological party, the NNP drove its conservative hardliners to the camps of the extremist Afrikaner organizations that still exist, yet the transformation was not thorough enough to convince its moderate supporters not to flock to the Democratic Party/Democratic Alliance. Throughout these processes, the NNP did not even consider maintaining its identity as the party of white Afrikaners, which had been its basis since the party’s inception. Instead, the NNP turned away from the ethnic tie of Afrikaner mobilization, in favor of a “social conservative” approach that supposedly would appeal to all minorities, based on community rights and family values.13


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This tactic failed to win the party supporters, and the last straw seemed to have been a coalition agreement that the NNP worked out with the ANC in 2001, which gave the ANC government power in the Western Cape. This deal put the NNP back into a close relationship with the ruling party, which made it difficult for the NNP to present itself as a genuine opposition party in advance of the 2004 elections (thus allowing the DA to assert that voting for the NNP equaled voting for the ANC). In 1996, the NP had withdrawn from the Government of National Unity precisely because of this problem; so it should have been no surprise that the difficulty of positioning the party as an entity in opposition yet also in cooperation with the ruling regime resurfaced in the 2004 campaign. When the 2004 election results began to filter into the IEC on the evening of April 14, the rumors began that the NNP was considering disbanding.14 The party denied these claims, and continued to present itself as a coherent organization, but the façade was short-lived. By the end of July the party announced that it would disband during the next defection window (September 2005). Party leader van Schalkwyk declared his intention to join the ANC and urged other NNP members to follow his lead. The NNP had been unable to carve out a role for itself in the new South Africa, and the party’s near-constant attempts to reinvent itself drove even its core supporters away. Alliances with and then withdrawals from the DP and ANC contributed to the image of a party that was lost, unsure of which way to turn, and without any core principles to guide it in the postapartheid period. Ultimately, the party was forced to concede that its experiment in creating a moderate, Christian-Democratic party, capable of attracting credible leaders and transforming into a nonracial organization, had failed. The second notable trend in opposition politics was that the composition and tenor of opposition significantly shifted several times in the postapartheid period. Together with the decline of the NP/ NNP, the rise of the DP/DA represented an important realignment in South African party politics in the first decade of democracy. In hindsight, transformation of the Democratic Party from a liberal, English-dominated voice for freedom into a more conservative form was more surprising than the decline of the NP. The DP earned just seven seats in the 1994 election, and decided that it would operate as a moderating voice and attempt to persuade the larger parties to adopt DP policy perspectives. The DP tactics changed by 1998, as the party began to position itself for the 1999 election. The DP shifted to a more aggressive stance, becoming a vocal opposition

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party, which earned party leader Tony Leon the moniker, “the Chihuahua.” In its bid to become the largest opposition party in 1999, the DP had aggressively courted the NNP’s Afrikaner support base, and subsequently created an alliance (the Democratic Alliance, DA) with the NNP in June 2000.15 In this process, the DP moved from being a party representing mainly English speakers (yet with a nonethnic platform), to one that attempted to represent all minorities (English and Afrikaner whites, Coloureds, and Indians).16 The party’s campaign efforts physically targeted minority voters, but the campaign appeals were couched in nonracial and nonethnic terminology.17 After the withdrawal of the NNP from the new party in 2001, the DP decided to maintain the new creation and officially became the DA at both local and national levels in April 2003.18 Regardless of DA claims that it represents the interests of all South Africans, the party has been widely perceived as a conservative protector of minority interests, opposing most ANC propositions on principle.19 Therefore, the DA’s potential to develop into a party capable of mounting a genuine electoral challenge to the ANC will remain limited, unless the party radically changes tack and recruits a large cohort of black supporters. The DA made small inroads into the black electorate in the 2004 election, but has yet to break through to significant support levels amongst this group. Similarly, the DA has yet to genuinely transform its leadership to include black, Coloured, and Indian leaders. Well into the second decade of democracy, most of its leaders were white, and those who were not had histories from the struggle era that rendered them suspect to many South Africans. Another notable shift in the contour of opposition politics that underscores the turn away from ethnic politics has been the IFP’s steady attempt to shift from a provincial, Zulu-based party to a national party that appeals to traditionalists and conservatives alike, without relying on calls to the Zulu ethnic identity. This is remarkable because throughout its existence, the IFP had earned political influence through its ability to mobilize Zulus and control the area that is now the KwaZulu-Natal province, and so any attempt to move beyond this type of appeal was a risk. In place of its long-standing emphasis on the status of the Zulu monarchy, respect for traditionalism and the rights of amakhosi (traditional leaders), and cultural selfdetermination through federalism, the IFP’s 1999, 2000, and 2004 election campaigns focused on a broad conservative platform (family values, anticrime, anticorruption, and a “revolution of goodwill), targeting potential supporters in virtually all population groups and in


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all provinces. The IFP rarely raised “traditional” issues outside of the deep rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal province. The IFP emerged from the 2004 election as the third largest party in the NA, the same ranking as in 1994 and 1999. The IFP’s bid to increase its performance outside KZN had failed in 1999, and after the 2004 election its presence in other provinces declined even further. But the most negative outcome of the 2004 election for the IFP was that the party lost its position as the largest party in KZN, and for the first time failed to secure a ministerial position in the national cabinet. Analysts had speculated that the ANC would want to retain Buthelezi in his cabinet position to prevent him from returning to an exclusive focus on KZN politics,20 but the ANC leadership evidently did not consider this a serious enough threat to retain Buthelezi at the national level. Both the IFP’s defeat in KZN and its exclusion from the national cabinet were highly significant, as KZN is the IFP’s stronghold and the party previously had retained national relevance through this national inclusion. The electoral fortunes of most other parties have remained steadily poor. In its 1999 campaign, the PAC attempted to shift its “Africanist” stance from its historically pro-black position, to include anyone whose primary allegiance was to the continent of Africa. The results were dismal, and by 2003 the party had lost its most visible member, Patricia de Lille. She left the PAC in 2003 to form a new party, which briefly represented a sign of hope for the opposition. The Independent Democrats (ID) formed in April 2003, just one year before the 2004 election, performed reasonably well, securing seven seats in the National Assembly. The ID seemed to have the potential to become a multiethnic, multiracial voice for the poor, if it could build a party organization that did not sustain itself solely through the charisma of its leader, De Lille. So far, the results have been mixed, and the party has experienced great turbulence in its founding years. The United Democratic Movement (UDM), which had entered the national political scene in 1999, had also briefly raised hopes that a nonracial or multiracial opposition party had arrived. But the party was extremely hard hit by defections in the “floor-crossing” periods, particularly in 2004, and by 2004 the UDM seemed to have been reduced to a primarily black, Eastern Cape-based, regional force. Finally, among the smaller opposition parties in parliament, the ACDP, though representing a small percentage of the overall vote, has performed relatively well, consistently increasing its vote share by a small margin in every election. The party, however, is still far from becoming anything close to a strong national force. There simply has been no

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explosion of ethnic and other small parties, often assumed endemic to PR systems and widely expected in postapartheid South Africa. Partisan Trends in Retrospect: Racial Instead of Ethnic Mobilization? Many analysts have argued that race-based mobilization has become the principal dividing line since the 1999 elections.21 It is true that parties like the NNP and DA, rather than competing with the ANC for the support of African voters, fought amongst themselves for the “minority vote”—whites, Coloureds, and Indians. Labeling these efforts as purely racialized politics, however, ignores some very important dimensions of these mobilization strategies. For one, the parties rarely used the explicit language of race to appeal to these voters. Second, these groups were often also urged to join the majority, or to unite in their status as countrywide minorities, despite the fact that there were real differences between the “minority” groups themselves. When the language of race was used to appeal to these voters, it was done in the vein of creating a multiracial, minority-based block, and these appeals were almost always couched in inclusive terms, as a way to include these communities into mainstream South African politics. Even if some degree of racial mobilization had taken place, it still did not push out multiracial strategies, and actually represented a viable approach to earn short-term, yet significant shares of the seats in the NA. Aside from a few small groups that persisted in calling for Afrikaner self-determination, the rhetoric has never called for one specific racial group to go it alone, nor have parties attempted to divide the groups from the rest of South African society. These are significant developments in a country formerly predicated on separate homelands for different racial and ethnic groups. Furthermore, racial mobilization does not counteract the basic logic of the volume’s central argument, for if a party was able to attract the votes of all minority racial groups, it could win a quarter of the seats in the National Assembly. This would not have been a strategy from which to challenge the ANC for control of the government, but it could have helped a party to be a significant player in the crucial formative years of the new regime. Finally, racial and class appeals often overlap in the South African context. What appeared to some to be to be messages of racial mobilization were often a mixture of class and non-African, interest-based mobilization. The appeals were not made on ascriptive, ethnic, or identity-based grounds, but on ideological and policy issues that


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happened to appeal to a particular subset of the population. Because of the history of apartheid, the material interests of these segments of the population often made them stand apart from the African groups. What do these trends in the evolution of the party system indicate for this project, which is interested in the presence or absence of ethnic mobilization? Part of the weak performance of the opposition parties can be attributed to the fact that none of them have attempted to break up the support block that the ANC aligns behind itself. The opposition parties have not missed the point that they need to weaken the ANC. What the parties have done is to develop mobilization strategies that respond to the country’s political institutions and the electoral incentives created by them, and these adaptations have led them away from strategies that would have provided a short-term challenge to the ANC. The cumulative result of all these trends has been relatively mundane partisan politics, an increasing domination of the political arena by the ANC, and a stable political system without threat of electoral and ethnic violence. In the long term, the move to interest-based politics is positive, for it has shifted the country away from the specter of ethnic conflict that had attended the transition in 1994, though in the short term, the opposition has been collectively weakened for their strategies.


Chapter 5


T

hroughout the first decade of true democracy, the ANC’s greatest fear was that it would lose its hegemonic hold over the African population because the party no longer had one clear issue that would unite a diverse citizenry behind it. Therefore, the party tried to prevent the emergence of a credible alternative: either a party that could articulate the interests of the disaffected poor and working class, or a set of parties that had the potential to fragment the delicate patchwork of ethnic groups that comprised the ANC’s electoral base. The ANC, therefore, implemented a variety of formal and informal mechanisms to protect the party from challengers. Chief among these tactics was the party’s use of its dominant position during constitutional negotiations to craft political institutions to its benefit. Where the party was forced to compromise and accept institutions that worked against its goals, it used its position at the head of government to shape their functions to be more in line with the ANC’s original principles. The ANC also capitalized on its moral legitimacy to define the contours of political debate. Each of these three tactics worked to prevent the activation of political identities that could have fractured the ANC’s diverse support base. Background of the ANC When South Africans voted for the ANC to head the government in April 1994, they were voting for a party that represented their hopes and dreams for a better future. After forty-six years of oppressive rule by the National Party, and approximately three hundred years of colonial rule before that, the majority of South Africans had finally won

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their political freedom. The ANC had been one of the primary agents responsible for the successful campaign against apartheid, a struggle that the organization had been waging since its establishment in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress (SANNC). A party of intellectuals, the SANNC had been created to defend the civil and political rights of Africans threatened by the emergence of a white supremacist state, the Union of South Africa. For most of its early years, the SANNC (renamed the African National Congress in 1923) was a forum for discussion and debate, protesting the actions of the Unionist government through petitions rather than activism.1 In the 1940s, a new generation of leaders, including Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo, Walter Sisulu, and Anton Lembede, pushed the organization in a more active direction, embracing tactics of popular mobilization. Influenced by Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress, the ANC’s new “Programme of Action” used nonviolent tactics such as protest, boycott, strike, and civil disobedience. The initial militancy of the activist strategy soon quieted down, and by the 1950s, the organization relied primarily on passive resistance and stayaways. During this time, the ANC formed the Congress Alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP, established in 1921) and the South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU, founded in 1955). In 1955, the ANC adopted the Freedom Charter, establishing its firm opposition to ethnic division and its promotion of nonracialism, equality, democracy, and a soft-socialist demand for social reform through redistribution and nationalization. As the government began to repress the relatively peaceful resistance movement, the ANC abandoned the strategy of peaceful resistance. In 1960 it established a military wing, Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), to advance the struggle through armed resistance and guerilla tactics. In response to the ANC’s new militarism, the government banned both the ANC and the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC, which had broken away from the ANC in 1959), forcing the two organizations to operate in exile from South Africa. Oliver Tambo led the ANC during the first two decades of exile, establishing organizational nuclei in London and Lusaka, Zambia. The ANC took some time to regroup in exile, remaining relatively inactive until the 1970s, when the organization rejuvenated itself in the wake of the 1976 Soweto uprisings. In the meantime, the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) had become the major resistance movement operating within South Africa. The government’s repression of the BCM following the student uprisings once again left a political vacuum in the resistance struggle. Underground ANC activists

T H E A N C : P L AY I N G T O W I N

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within the country soon reorganized and advanced a policy of armed struggle and propaganda to resist the government. At the same time, the organization in exile developed links with many countries, most notably the Soviet Union (which provided arms and military training), Eastern Europe, Scandinavia (supplying the organization with money) and the Frontline States (African countries ringing South Africa in which the ANC established bases). The ANC’s alliance with the SACP made many Western governments suspicious of the organization and its motives. As a result, the organization did not build ties with Western governments until the 1980s, when sympathetic antiapartheid movements arose in many countries. During its exile years, the operational center of the ANC was housed in Lusaka, Zambia, where it created a shadow government that coordinated the ANC’s effort to establish an underground network within South Africa, “Operation Vula” (literally, “Operation Open”). In 1983, a number of community-based resistance movements came together to form an umbrella organization to coordinate their efforts, the United Democratic Front (UDF). The UDF maintained secret ties to the ANC, and coordinated the efforts of the Mass Democratic Movement (MDM) with the ANC’s international publicity drive and the internal efforts of the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU, established in 1985).2 By the late 1980s, the ANC shifted its tactics once again, officially embracing a strategy of negotiation and reform. In 1990, after four years of secret negotiations, the government unbanned the ANC and released the ANC’s remaining imprisoned leaders, including Nelson Mandela. A year later, the UDF dismantled itself and merged with the ANC. Over the course of three separate rounds of negotiations in the early 1990s, the ANC and the Nationalist government finally drafted an interim constitution and structure under which the country would make the transition to democratic rule. Elections were set for April 27, 1994. In the campaign for these elections, the ANC ran on a platform that promoted peace, jobs, and freedom. The party’s slogan, “a better life for all,” encapsulated the mood of hope and exultation that accompanied the party in the campaign for these historic elections. With its strategy built on Mandela’s personal credibility and the party’s long struggle against apartheid, the party also promulgated a comprehensive economic program entitled the “Reconstruction and Development Programme.” After the elections, the ANC had won 62.65 percent of the vote and control over six of the nine provinces (it gained control over a seventh through an alliance with the DP). The party’s support base was over 95 percent African, with a scattering of

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support from Coloureds, whites, and Indians. Very few white South Africans nationwide supported the party.3 In the Western Cape, the ANC lost control to the NP, primarily because working-class Coloureds supported the NP en masse. In KwaZulu-Natal, the IFP earned a bare majority of the provincial votes in a highly contested election, in an outcome that many agree was most likely determined through negotiations between the ANC, IFP, and the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC).4 Coming to power with such a strong hold on the reins of government supplied the ANC with many resources to protect its support base. These could be grouped into three broad categories: the party’s ability to shape public and political discourse, maintaining a strategic alliance with the SACP and COSATU, and using the resources of incumbency. By shaping political discourse, the party actively worked to prevent the emergence of political identities capable of fracturing the party’s support base. The alliance with the SACP and COSATU, the Tripartite Alliance, lent the ruling party the ideological flexibility to prevent the emergence of credible challengers from the left, and with concrete networks that neutralized the threat of resistance from organized labor as the party began to restructure the state and the economy. Finally, incumbency provided the ANC with resources to reward supporters, increase loyalty to the organization, and structure state institutions to the benefit of the continued dominance of the party. Managing Political Identities and Loyalties One of the most powerful resources at the ANC’s disposal was its ability to set the rules of the game by virtue of its overwhelming control over the government after 1994. The first democratic parliament had many responsibilities, many of which fundamentally altered the country’s political structure. For much of its first two years, members of parliament (MPs) in the National Assembly (NA) were also members of a Constituent Assembly (CA) in charge of drafting a permanent constitution for South Africa. Second, during this time the NA repealed the laws that had created the apartheid system and in their place drafted and passed a body of legislation designed to transform South African society, economics, and politics. Manipulating Institutions Chapter 3 discussed the institutional factors that nationalize power, so here the discussion briefly highlights the ANC’s logic in advancing certain of those institutions and how it interacted with them in practice.


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Despite the fact that the ANC was forced to concede to the NNP and IFP on the creation of a federal system, the party was able to structure other institutions in a way that helped it to preserve its support base. The ANC’s objection to a federal state had not been solely based on distrust bred by the apartheid government’s use of federalism to advance the segregationist policies of the apartheid government. Strategically, the ANC knew that a federal system was more likely to devolve political competition to lower levels where the expression of “artificial” ethnic identities would be more easily facilitated, while the centralization of power in a unitary state would counteract those tendencies. Centralizing power would move the most critical political competition to the national tier, where ethnic, regional, and other small group identities would be much less salient and less easily mobilized. Moreover, national competition would also help to shelter the ANC’s own support base from ethnic entrepreneurs. Therefore, the ANC had designed other aspects of the political institutions to centralize power. The ANC’s insistence on a proportional representation system using closed candidate lists, ostensibly to guarantee the representation of minority groups, in practice counteracted personalized politics, federal tendencies, and ethnic entrepreneurialism. Without ties to geographic constituencies, politicians could not build up local power bases. Since all positions in government were gained through candidate lists, a politician had to adhere to party policies and the dictates of party bosses to remain in a position of political power. Those who cultivated local power bases despite the closed-list system, soon found themselves sidelined and forced out of power, as happened with Mathole Motshega, Cyril Ramaphosa, and Tokyo Sexwale.5 According to Mervyn Frost, this structuring of the electoral system to undermine the federal system was intentional: The degree to which the new electoral system was a political boss’s charter was further emphasized by the clause which determined that any MPs who lost the confidence of their party (that is, their party’s leadership) could by the party’s decision alone be excluded from parliament. There were to be no floor-crossers or back-bench rebels, by law. When this clause was added to the fact that the party bosses already held power of political life and death over their MPs—because they decided on the names on their lists and their order— the result was a push towards an extreme centralization of power liable to negate most, if not all, of the federal influences within the rest of the constitution.6

The closed-list PR system forced accountability upward to the party leadership, making individual politicians dependent on currying favor

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upward rather than by cultivating a following on the ground. This strong party discipline meant that party members, even in the supposedly autonomous provinces, would never dare to contradict their party leaders, and it also was meant to curb internal factionalism around powerful personalities or ethnic rivalries. In practice, the extensive concurrence of powers between national and provincial governments also centralized power by undermining the autonomy of the provinces, even those outside ANC control. The national government had the power to take over functions under exclusive provincial jurisdiction, either to enforce national norms and standards or to prevent “unreasonable” action being taken prejudicial to another province or the country as a whole. The ANC actively used this authority to take over, dismiss and even reappoint provincial governments when under duress. So far, the national government has used this power only in the provinces under the ANC’s control, and only when internal party rivalries threatened the unity of the party organization in the province. In other words, the national government interfered in provincial politics, undermining provincial autonomy, primarily to deflect threats to the party’s unity and integrity. The central party organization of the ANC maintained a vigilant watch over politics in provinces with ANC-led governments. The ANC did not want local rivalries to develop into cohesive ethnic or regional movements. Therefore, when provinces experienced internal rivalries between 1994 and 1999, the ANC’s National Executive Committee (NEC) was quick to get involved. In the Free State, for example, tensions developed between the ANC’s choice for provincial premier, Patrick “Terror” Lekota (now Mosiuoa Lekota) and the local party elites. The quarrel between Lekota and the local organization tied into a provincial north-south rivalry that had the potential to develop into an enduring regional divide. The ANC attempted to resolve the problem by removing Lekota, and “redeploying” him to the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). The NEC asked the provincial cabinet to dissolve itself, and in its place appointed a caretaker government. Similar dynamics unfolded in the Northern Province and the Eastern Cape in this period. Moreover, in late 1998 the party announced that, in the future, the NEC would nominate provincial premier candidates to avoid the internal rivalries caused when provincial party structures supported candidates other than the one chosen for them by the party’s national executive.7 By centralizing power, the ANC developed mechanisms to prevent the emergence of internal rivalries that could have threatened the viability of the organization, and it raised political competition to a level


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that made ethnic, regional, or other small-scale mobilizations unrewarding and difficult to effect. Power and Patronage Just as the ANC manipulated institutional structures to help the party defuse the emergence of internal ethnic rivalries and ideological factionalisms, the party also used the resources of state power to shore up its base, retain political loyalties, and facilitate identification with the party in preference to identification with ethnic groups. The ANC came to power in 1994 with a rhetoric of nonracialism and an alliance that brought together a diverse array of organizations and societal groups. The construction of the ANC’s alliance and support base required “ways of talking that were aimed at preventing the irreparable fracturing of the ‘black’ voice, ways of talking that kept potentially divisive (and destructive) tendencies in this construction within a framework that allowed for multiple visions of the future.”8 An official policy of nonracialism, with an acknowledged reality that nonracialism would actually benefit the formerly oppressed African majority, was the vehicle to accomplish this goal. Every South African knows very well that “majoritarian” democracy means African democracy with a cloak of “nonracial” upliftment of the formerly oppressed. The ANC used the resources of state control to reinforce the rhetorical tightrope. It pushed policies that empowered a new “black” elite, creating a skilled, wealthy black middle class that owed its position to the policies of the government rather than to independent entrepreneurial activities.9 This group awarded loyalty to the ANC partially out of self-interest, to be sure, but regardless of the motivation, the practical effect was a strong dissuasion against ethnic politics. Members of this group would be much less likely to support ethnic organizations when their futures were guaranteed by often aligning themselves with the ANC’s official nonracialism that was a thinly cloaked Africanism. “The ANC prefers to raise African elites, with the effect of detaching class from race but without threatening the essential interests of business and without preventing the ANC from using racial appeals for its own purposes. The ideology of nonracialism comes in handy here.”10 To do this, the ANC has passed legislation and awarded contracts to create and support the new black elite, while making some concessions to the working and poorer classes that would keep them modestly loyal to the party. In this project, the ANC had more autonomy than it had possessed when it was crafting political institutions; once

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in firm control of the parliamentary process, the ANC had the sole authority in the drafting and passage of legislation. The ANC could pass virtually any piece of legislation without the support of the opposition parties, and by 1997 it had become obvious that parliamentary procedure often served as a mere formality in the development of legislation. Most of the genuine legislative work was accomplished within ANC party caucuses and in meetings between the ANC and its alliance partners.11 The party passed acts that served to cement the loyalties of its diverse constituents by providing them material benefits. Through these activities, the ANC used its position in power to create a spoils system that reinforced people’s ties to the party, creating a cadre of citizens who were less susceptible to political mobilization by other movements. For labor, the ANC passed the Basic Conditions of Employment Act (No. 75, 1997) and the Skills Development Act (No. 97, 1997). To promote the advancement of nonwhites overall, in late 1998 the party legislated an affirmative action policy, the Employment Equity Act (No. 55, 1998). These and many other pieces of legislation were designed to advance the position of nonwhites in various economic sectors of South African society while keeping the nonracial language intact. When selecting target groups, the legislation avoided using language that singled out Africans specifically to permit the impression that these acts were designed to help Africans, Coloureds, and Indians, equally. The bills also sought to advance opportunities for the “previously disadvantaged,” women, and the physically disabled. The intentional use of language that did not distinguish between ethnic or racial groups within the formerly oppressed had the double benefit of addressing the inequalities bred by the apartheid system while also helping to avert the emergence of political divisions between the groups. After 1998, the policies were supplemented by provisions contained in the Employment Equity Act that required any businesses employing over fifty people to submit to the government concrete plans to advance nonwhites in their companies. In practice, as the deadline to submit employment equity plans came due, employers were careful to attempt to mimic a census-perfect approximation of “Africans,” “Coloureds,” “Indians,” and women in their plans to align with the dictates of the Employment Equity legislation.12 The government further supported black enterprises by helping black-owned businesses to compete against their white-owned competitors. As the ANC deracialized state institutions and improved access to management positions for blacks in the private sector, the presence of Africans in the top income quintile


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increased. The promotion of nonwhites to management positions was largely due to the growth of black economic empowerment requirements in government tender, procurement, and privatization policies. The policies were effective: as a percentage of total market capitalization on the Johannesburg Stock Exchange (JSE), “Black-chip” shares increased from 0.05 percent in 1995 to 20 percent in 1998.13 Democracy in South Africa still is officially nonracial, and by definition, a majoritarian democracy in South Africa empowers Africans, since Africans are the majority of the population—but only so long as Africans remain a cohesive bloc. If this community had divided itself politically into ethnic groups, there would be no majority group in South Africa. The ANC would quickly lose its majority and the destructive fracturing of the black voice could have taken place. The ANC stays in power by both empowering Africans as Africans and as the “formerly disadvantaged,” using power and patronage to ensure that they will not identify politically as members of smaller ethnic communities. Thus it became part of the ANC’s mission to prevent a fracturing of the African voice, preventing the emergence of sub-African identities that could be ethnic (Xhosa, Zulu, Tswana, etc). Strategic Alliances Once in government, the ANC used its historic alliance with leftist organizations to help it straddle the ideological spectrum from the center-right to the center-left, circumscribing the ideological arena for other political parties and maintaining the loyalties of the working poor. As inequalities between the new elite and the mass of poor Africans have grown, the urban and rural poor wondered where they fit in with the government’s policies. The ANC may have been able to secure the loyalties of the class most likely to appreciate conservative economic policies of liberalization mixed with affirmative action, but the legislation and black empowerment initiatives could not insulate the ANC from discontents among the urban and rural poor not affected by these policies. The party used other mechanisms to retain their support. During the struggle for liberation the ANC had formed strong ties with trade unions and civil society that benefited the ruling party after the transition. The Tripartite Alliance with the SACP and COSATU bequeathed to the party a variety of benefits, both ideological and practical.14 During the apartheid era, the alliance enabled the ANC and the UDF to keep operating even when political organization and activities were banned, because the restrictions on trade union activism

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were not as tight. The SACP provided the party with highly educated, intellectual, and articulate leaders (mostly from the SACP). In the postapartheid era, the ANC’s relationship with SACP and COSATU has been based on a mix of ideology and interest, challenging any organization that could have attempted to organize the same population along ethnic lines. Maintaining the Alliance allowed the ANC to incorporate a wide range of ideological perspectives within a single umbrella organization, providing the ruling party with the flexibility to claim to represent both left and center political interests along nonracial lines. Continuing its close relationship with COSATU gave the ANC inside influence over the most powerful trade union organization in the country, which has helped the party to channel and defuse resistance to its economic policies. COSATU could organize worker protests, which gave the workers the feeling that their concerns were being heard, while the ANC as a political party advanced its neoliberal economic restructuring. At election times, COSATU provided the ANC with election foot soldiers, compensating for the ANC’s failure to maintain many of its branch-level organizations between 1994 and 2003.15 The ANC’s alliance with these organizations came under strain in the mid-1990s, though the party was able to keep it together and avoid fragmentation into competing ethnic and ideological groups. When the government backed away from the redistributive promises made by the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) and embraced the conservative economic policies of the Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, the party was able to keep some of the resulting tensions contained within COSATU structures. Since then, periodic “crises” within the Alliance have failed to see it fragment; the SACP and COSATU value the voice they have in the government too much to break away from the ANC, even as they complain that they are sidelined in the governance process.16 With the enactment of GEAR, the ANC shifted its ideological position further to the right than ever in its history. This should have opened up political space to the left of the ANC for alternative political organizations, but the strategic relationship with COSATU and the SACP retained leftist elements within the umbrella movement and allowed the party to claim the left political space as well as the right.17 For example, for the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) to situate itself to the left of the Alliance formation, it was forced to retain antiquated policies of nationalization and radical land redistribution that many South Africans view as simplistic and out of date, and this undermined the credibility of the PAC.


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With the available spectrum of ideologically based mobilization thus tied up both on the left and the right of the ANC, it becomes even more surprising that parties did not resort to ethnic mobilization. Parties that traditionally had situated themselves either to the left or the right of the ANC suffered from the occupation of their traditional ideological territory by the ANC; they found it difficult to locate alternative mobilization strategies. Yet they did not want to move into ethnically based mobilization patterns, for such strategies would not provide a foundation on which large parties such as the NNP or DP could build to increase their presence in the National Assembly. Similarly, mobilizing just one racial group—such as whites or Coloureds—would permit a party sufficient strength to take on the massive ANC. Small parties and relative newcomers, such as the United Democratic Front, similarly eschewed ethnic mobilization, for even if parties could gain a foothold in the National Assembly through these strategies, they still would be too small to make much of an impact. Shaping Political Discourse Outside these institutional manipulations, the ANC has been able to manipulate the postapartheid political scene to its advantage by shaping political discourse to discourage ethnic mobilization. As the party assumed the mantle of governance after 1994, it found many opportunities to shape the terrain of political debate. Through the party’s speeches, press statements, and other public pronouncements, it advanced rhetoric that simultaneously embraced the contradictory philosophies of nonracialism, Africanism, and nonwhite unity. By courting an intentional ambiguity within its mobilizing discourse, the ANC created the flexibility to shape political identities in a variety of directions. In more negative ways as well, the party attempted to delegitimate ideas that ran counter to its vision, thereby enforcing a political norm in which criticism from any quarter was interpreted as being against transformation. Mobilizing Discourse to Unify the Party’s Support Base Before and after the transition process, the ANC advanced nonracial rhetoric to unite the entire country behind the transition. The “rainbow nation” concept embraced nonracialism, nonsexism and a vision of South Africa as a united and democratic society. It served

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the purpose of reassuring white South Africans (and business interests) that a postapartheid government would not turn against them as soon as they ceded control of the state. During this time, such discourse also worked to convince international capital not to flee from South Africa. The Truth and Reconciliation process was founded under the theme of reconciliation and nation building encapsulated in this idea. After the transition, as the party learned that delivering on its promises would not be easy and that the romantic concept of the rainbow nation was not sufficient to keep its core supporters within the fold, its discourse quickly became more nuanced. While party officials still advocated the ideals of nonracialism, the “two nations” rhetoric began to enter into public discourse. With increasing frequency, ANC officials began to group South Africans into two camps: the “previously disadvantaged,” and “previously advantaged.” Much of this rhetoric was designed to emphasize the commonalities between nonwhites, rather than their differences. The rainbow metaphor, with its beautiful yet distinct colors lying side by side, had been replaced with one that offered up a vast chasm between the rich and the poor. Whites were located on one side, and nonwhites on the other. Such shaping of political discourse helped to protect the party from challenges that sought to court the divisions that exist between the groups, especially as Coloureds and Indians began to worry about their place in the postapartheid order. For example, in a document on future strategy and tactics outlined by the party in 1994, the ANC avoided using race-based language, speaking instead of the “majority” or “democratic majority,” and of “oppressed people.” The elections of April 1994 represented “the culmination of the heroic struggle by the majority of the people . . . [a] struggle which forced the apartheid regime to concede the need for negotiations with the genuine representatives of the oppressed people. The negotiations opened the way for the establishment of a government based on the will of the democratic majority.”18 The concept of the black-white divide had deep roots in the ANC’s history. As early as 1950, the ANC had drafted the Freedom Charter with the express intent of bringing Coloured and Indian organizations into the antiapartheid struggle. By 1969, the ANC officially advanced the idea that the central divide in South Africa was between the black majority and whites. As Pallo Jordan stated in a paper discussing the “national question” in South Africa, “since the 1969 Morogoro Conference the ANC has held the view that the contradiction between the colonized black majority (Africans, Coloureds and


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Indians) and the white oppressor state is the most visible and dominant contradiction within apartheid ruled South Africa.”19 The ANC knew that without the unifying imperative of the antiapartheid struggle, it had to consciously reinforce the ties between nonwhites (Africans, Coloureds, and Indians), and that the three groups would not automatically see their interests as aligned. In the postapartheid situation, unity between nonwhites was no longer necessary, and so divisions could easily surface. ANC intellectuals, many of whom had obtained university and professional degrees abroad during the long years of exile, knew the chances for fragmentation were genuine. The ANC’s 1994 discussion paper outlining the party’s strategy and tactics stated that we [the ANC] still have to convince these [the Indian and Coloured] communities that the policies and programmes of the ANC, in the long term, guarantee the best interest of the country as a whole as opposed to the short-term sectional interests devised by the grand Apartheid strategy of the past.20

By focusing on the positioning of Africans, Coloureds. and Indians in the lower socioeconomic strata, the ANC could fashion an artificial “other” in the white community. The common experience of apartheid-oppression and the struggle against apartheid facilitated the maintenance of the black-white opposition. At the same time as the ANC used the nonracial and two-nations discourses, the party also produced messages that prioritized Africans within the context of improving the lives of the entire “democratic majority.” Discussing the major obstacles facing South Africa as it moved into the postapartheid era, the 1994 strategy document stated: The main contradiction of [the post-1994] phase is the yawning political, economic and social disparities based on race and ethnicity which were created and consolidated by apartheid rule over the years. It is for this reason that the main content of this phase continues to be the allround political, economic and social emancipation of the black majority in general and the African people in particular. The final objective of the national liberation revolution still lies ahead of us.21

To prevent the emergence of politicized ethnic divisions within Africans, the ANC specifically worked to delegitimize the concept of within-African ethnicity as a valid social division in modern South Africa. In the ANC’s belief, the subjugation of indigenous peoples

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under colonialism and the apartheid system had created far more ties than divisions between Africans of various ethnic groups. Therefore, any manifestations of ethnic consciousness after 1948, the ANC argued, had been created by the divisive strategies of the apartheid government. Jordan’s exposition of the ANC’s stance on this point is worth quoting at length: The revival of African ethnicity thus had little to do with nostalgia for past greatness on the part of the Africans. It was even less the articulation of a “psychological urge” (as the theorists of ethnicity claim) to cohere as members of a unique ethnic community. It clearly was a deliberate act of state policy to subvert the struggle for equality and freedom on the part of the African people. After such policies, any manifestation of ethnicity quite clearly has nothing to do with “blood,” “the ancestors,” “the soil” and other attributes which ethnicists invariably invoke. It does however have everything to do with white racist policies to thwart the aspirations of our people for freedom, democracy and equality.22

In the ANC’s view, ethnic groups no longer had any political legitimacy. The long struggle of Africans against colonialism and apartheid (labeled by the ANC, “colonialism of a special type”) had submerged within African political divisions for so long that they no longer had any genuine relevance. Any attempt to capitalize politically on ethnic divisions, therefore, simply represented political manipulation in its most opportunistic and divisive form. Mobilizing Discourse to Undermine Critics The ANC’s self-preservation through discourse took negative forms as well, often to delegitimize critics and deflect criticism as racist or antitransformation. On the one hand, the party attempted to preserve the authority and status it had commanded during the antiapartheid struggle by portraying any disagreement with government party as disloyalty to the liberation struggle and goals of transformation. This helped the ANC to reinforce the perception that nonwhites should band together against whites as the country addressed the legacies of apartheid. On the other hand, ANC leaders and government spokespeople regarded criticism from “historically white” organizations, parties, and institutions as evidence of conspiratorial resistance to transformation. Such agents, in the opinion of the ANC, only criticized the government out of a wish to defend the privileges they had enjoyed during the oppressive apartheid regime.


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The underlying idea was that if nonwhites felt that liberation had not yet succeeded, or that transformation was under threat, they would be more likely to remain loyal to the ANC. Political ties between the disparate nonwhite groups would be strengthened by the maintenance of an “other” within the polity: whites. In characterizing opposition in these ways, the ANC was attempting to insulate itself from critics, to keep the threat of minority domination alive in people’s minds. Both ends would serve to help the ANC remain dominant. Since 1994, the ANC has not tolerated criticism well, whether from entities internal to the organization or from outside. For example, the ANC labeled a court summons served on Nelson Mandela a “sabotage of democracy”; such labeling was evidence that the courts were frustrating transformation. The ANC also branded an unsuccessful attempt by Business South Africa to challenge the legal validity of the Medical Schemes Bill as a conspiracy by people bent on frustrating the transformation.23 The ANC’s deep distrust of the media in general pervaded many of its statements, but the party was especially intolerant of black journalists who made unfavorable evaluations of government performance or ANC policy. As the editor of a prominent daily newspaper stated, When blacks dare to express a view critical of the ruling party and Government, they are dismissed as “peace-time heroes” and “ unSouth African.” When concerned citizens refuse to accept Government assurances that crime is on the decline, they are said by the president to be “disloyal” to the Government and the country.24

Not only did the ANC brand such critics as un-South African, it questioned the motives behind the sentiments. According to Mandela, “the bulk of the mass media in our country has set itself up as a force opposed to the ANC.”25 When journalists publicized internal rivalries within ANC structures in mid-1999, the ANC publicly stated that the journalists must have had an agenda antithetical to the interests of the ANC. According to ANC spokesperson Smuts Ngonyama, “A clear pattern has emerged that the journalists referred to are committed to continuing this work in pursuance of a questionable agenda. They will be spoken to individually by the ANC.”26 The ANC’s intolerance of dissent extended to its own members, especially if they took their comments outside of the party. The ANC’s National Executive Committee expelled one of its own members, Bantu Holomisa, in June 1996 when he went public with allegations

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of corruption against ANC leader Stella Sigcau. At the time, the NEC stated, “[I]nternal democratic debate should not be confused with public pronouncements by individual leaders and members challenging ANC policies, questioning the bona fides of other members and casting aspersions on the performance of the movement in government or elsewhere.”27 While Holomisa’s expulsion was one of the more extreme examples of the rising intolerance of debate, his situation was not unique. ANC members, whether from the rank and file or from the leadership, were branded as “populists” if they argued that the ANC spent too much time appeasing whites and did not do enough to improve the situation of the “black masses” who had voted it into power in the first place.28 Criticism from whites was not tolerated any better. “When whites express concern about crime and others wish to emigrate, they are dismissed by Mandela as cowards who have two things in common: ‘Skin colour and a conviction that violent crime did not happen to others.’ ”29 This reflected the general theme that only those driven by “narrow and hostile partisan interests” could possibly find fault with any of the changes that had taken place since 1994. In the party’s statement to commemorate its 86th anniversary, the NEC wrote that “in an effort to restore themselves to positions of political power, [some] argue that the problems the new South Africa has to grapple with are the creation of the democratic order and therefore represent the failure of democracy.”30 The statement concluded that such people made these arguments because they were determined to mount an offensive to regain their positions of political power. Examples of this abound. The ANC branded parliamentary opposition from the historically white parties, especially the DP and the NNP, as antitransformation attempts to preserve white privilege, and thus illegitimate. These parties had no right to challenge the ANC on government policies or performance, not just because the parties represented white interests, but also because the people making the criticisms themselves were white. To give just one example, While the self-righteous Tony Leon and Marthinus van Schalkwyk were growing up amid the privileges accorded to the white middle-class in Apartheid South Africa, Nelson Mandela was breaking rocks on Robben Island in punishment for wanting to secure those privileges for all South Africans. . . . Parliament is merely a vehicle for them to get their view across to the narrow and dwindling sectional interests they seek to represent.31

The ANC’s message was clear: opposition parties, in raising issues for debate, merely meant to obstruct the workings of the government for


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the good of the South African people. The DP and NNP could not possibly offer any legitimate critique of government policy, for they were “obviously” attempting to stymie any changes that might threaten their white, advantaged constituents at the expense of the black masses. These are just a few examples of the ways in which the ANC shaped political discourse to aid the party’s quest to remain the dominant party in South Africa. The party mobilized South Africans by increasing the perception that elements from the old regime still threatened them. The ANC structured political discourse to minimize intrablack inequalities and emphasize the difference between blacks and whites. Finally, ANC discourses were designed to keep alive the memory of the struggle for liberation. In this way, the party could portray itself as seeking national reconciliation while simultaneously seeking to reinforce the black-white divisions that kept the party in power. Shaping Discourse during Electoral Periods These tactics became most apparent and most salient in the minds of South Africans during electoral periods. The ANC used electoral periods to alter the terrain of political debate, introducing campaign themes that set priorities for each subsequent five-year period. During this time, the party was most active in undermining the opposition and sending messages about unity and progress, while at the same time emphasizing the disparities between whites and blacks and casting all opposition parties as illegitimate. The party also reinforced the messages that unified its support base, further deflecting any potential attempts to mobilize the interest groups and ethnic communities within the party’s base. Evidence from the party’s main campaign themes and tactics in the 1999 and 2004 elections serves to underscore these points. The ANC’s main goals in all three national and provincial elections revolved around increasing its dominance of the state to lead the transformation of South Africa without challenges and compromise. ANC party strategists consistently aimed to win the party the muchcoveted two-thirds majority in parliament, which would enable the party to unilaterally modify the constitution (and remove the compromises it had been forced to accept during negotiations). The party also desired to control all nine provinces, so that there would be no “holdouts” to ANC control and bastions of minority power remaining in the country. The ANC’s goal in the June 1999 national and provincial elections was to increase its hold on the national electorate, specifically to

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obtain an “increased mandate” for change. Winning an overwhelming majority would help the party to speed up the pace of change and to govern with a more unified mandate.32 At several points in the 1999 campaign, ANC leaders publicly claimed that the party desired to win a two-thirds majority, a goal necessary to achieve the “democratic majority rule” that would enable the ANC to govern unfettered by opposition and, they claimed, truly deliver to the people.33 In the run-up to the 2004 election, the slogan became “speeding up change,” which would require even more control. The secondary goal in both the 1999 and 2004 elections was to win control over the two provinces that had eluded the ANC in the 1994 elections, the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. To the ANC, opposition party control over these provinces had created obstacles to delivery and transformation, and the ANC wanted to govern KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape to remove those obstacles. The party achieved this goal in the 2004 elections. Before the 1999 and 2004 elections, the main obstacle facing the party was not another party, or internal factionalism, but dissatisfaction with the pace of change and fears that, with increased apathy, many of the party’s previous supporters would not turn out for the elections. In most regions, therefore, ANC campaigning focused on African voters already within the party’s base.34 In 1999, the party had relied on COSATU for most local-level campaigning, but since its relations with COSATU became rocky between 1999 and 2004, the party decided to go directly to the voters for 2004. Well in advance of the 2004 elections, the party invested time and resources to revitalize local branch structures, returning to its roots of grassroots activism and participation.35 The electoral campaign then built on this foundation. The party’s campaigns systematically employed a variety of themes to appeal primarily to its core African support base, concentrating on the problems affecting the rural and the poor. The party’s most effective strategies have been to highlight the party’s successes and explain its failures, and have been specifically designed to counter rising levels of dissatisfaction and impatience with the pace of change. For example, the 1999 election manifesto opened with the following: Five years ago you elected a government of the people to begin removing the terrible system of apartheid. In these five short years, your government, led by the ANC, has created a new legacy of freedom and democracy. Our central challenge for the next five years is to use the experience we have gained, the policies we have put in place and the


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institutions of democracy we have created, to bring about even greater change.36

In 2004, the campaign theme changed from “Together: Fighting for Change,” to “We must now get down to work.” It focused on the core message that only the ANC could unite South Africans for a better life and that, now that the party was in firm control of the government, it would take the lessons of the past ten years and speed up the pace of change.37 In both 1999 and 2004, these tactics worked, and the party was able to win massive electoral victories despite opinion polls that, midcycle, had expressed vast dissatisfaction with government policies.38 The messages meant to recognize the dissatisfaction, explain the problems, and reassure the electorate that the party had heard their problems. The strategy intended to mobilize these supporters to vote, rather than to make them abstain from the electoral process altogether. Since the ANC knew that it would head the next government, a great deal of the party’s campaign in 1999 also focused on the transition from Mandela to Mbeki, assuring voters that Mbeki was the man to get things done and speed up change. In the later part of 2004 campaign, these messages reinforced the image of Mbeki as an effective president, with no other candidate capable of fulfilling his role. At each electoral cycle the party has mounted a comprehensive campaign designed to counteract the campaigns of opposition parties seeking to play on the fears of Coloureds and Indians. Opinion polls and election results demonstrated that despite the ANC’s rhetoric, in both 1999 and 2004, members of these minority communities still felt insecure about their status in postapartheid South Africa. Many were worried that the black empowerment policies of the government would leave them out. In contrast to parties that attempted to win their votes based on these feelings of displacement and alienation, the ANC issued campaign rhetoric and messages designed to reinforce the ties between Coloured, Indian, and black (African) South Africans. For example, in 1999 the then presidential candidate Thabo Mbeki spoke about the progress in social integration between the races and praised the South African Agricultural Union for its efforts to speed up land reform, while President Mandela stated in a television interview that “anybody who (could) not see the white hand (in reconciliation) was blind.”39 Cabinet minister Jacob Zuma reassured business elites in Gauteng about the ANC’s commitment to GEAR and pledged that the government would move faster to implement the policies contained in the macroeconomic framework after the elections.40 At the

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same time, the ANC told whites not to waste their votes on opposition parties playing on their insecurities. “Did thousands of people die and others rot in jail or be tortured so that we can fight about who best opposes the new order?”41 The ANC also consistently characterized the opposition as obstructionist and pandering to minority interests. In a famous address to a business community in upscale Houghton, Mandela lectured the primarily white audience that they had to accept responsibility for voting in the past for the apartheid government. This time around, he said, whites should support the ANC, as “Mickey-Mouse” opposition parties had played no useful role whatsoever.42 In both campaigns, the ANC did not take for granted that people would remember the dark days of apartheid, and so campaigners reminded voters of how far the country had come. The party aggressively stepped up rhetoric designed to regenerate the spirit of the struggle. Such a strategy also reinforced the political loyalties of those who had become disenchanted with the ANC in government, reminding them of where their loyalties should lie. The ANC also used the past to delegitimate opposition parties. In the 1999 campaign, ANC campaigners raised the apartheid history of the NNP and the DP, often explicitly labeling the parties racist relics of the past. Campaigners also contrasted the ANC’s roots with the newness of the United Democratic Movement (UDM), while questioning the role that the UDM’s leaders had played in the apartheid era. For example, Sports Minister Steve Tshwete criticized the name change of the NNP, saying, “How do you design yourself new? If you are a polecat, you remain a polecat.”43 In Gauteng, the ANC’s candidate for the premiership, Sam Shilowa (then president of COSATU), campaigned against the NNP by telling voters that “the white government sent you to stay in Tsakane far away from town. In the old location you could go to town on foot but now you have to spend a lot of money on transport. This is the same NP that today wants your votes, comrades!”44 In another instance, Mbeki told supporters at a rally in the Western Cape that people who did not understand the problems they had created could not possibly lead the province out of those problems.45 To delegitimize the DP/DA, the ANC often alleged that the organization was a racist party that represented the white elite. According to the ANC, the DP had taken on so many conservative defectors since 1994 and had moved so far to the right that its liberal forebears would never recognize the party that existed in 1999. Jeremy Cronin, deputy secretary general of the SACP, made a typical comment during a debate at the University of the Witswatersrand when he said: “Because the


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ANC is in government, white minority parties like the DP are using the race issue. The hidden message when they campaign in white suburbs is: you see what happens when blacks take over. It’s a racist message.”46 These tactics were designed to underscore the political divide between whites and nonwhites that had enabled the ANC to win such a large portion of the national election results; they would also undercut the mobilization potential of the opposition parties and the lure of ethnic mobilization. At the same time that the party’s leaders were berating minority voters for supporting obstructionist parties and urging them to join the majority, the ANC also reinforced the perception of there being “two nations” in South Africa, one poor and black, and the other rich and white. This strategy was most conspicuous in the 1999 elections. For example, in one instance, Mbeki told South Africans that they had let go of their anger at apartheid too quickly, and they should still get angry about the past. When one walks around the country, one finds that the legacy of apartheid still sits on our shoulders. . . . But the memory of apartheid is fading and perhaps there is too much forgiveness. . . . I think we should be angry about our history of the enslavement of our people, about colonisation and angry about apartheid.47

When attempting to regain lost support in Gauteng, the ANC blamed declining standards and problems in service delivery on the continuing legacy of apartheid. During a visit with residents of Soweto, Mbeki specifically blamed the rising crime level on continuing misdistribution of resources between black and white areas.48 To further reinforce the perception of a valid nonwhite-white divide, ANC rhetoric often condemned the enduring economic disparities between the previously disadvantaged and the previously advantaged, intentionally using the nonracial terms. Addressing a gathering in Durban, Mbeki told those assembled that in South Africa, “there are enormous disparities in wealth and income. We need to do something to do away with these wide gaps and to ensure that there is better, more equitable distribution of wealth.”49 The subtext, which the crowd implicitly understood, was that Mbeki was discussing the unequal distribution between blacks and whites, rather than inequality within the black community. At each electoral cycle, the party created a national campaign committee that would develop strategies and themes that were then delivered to provincial election committees to implement.50 In this way,

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the party ensured that the entire campaign followed the national objectives and targeted specific groups with appropriate messages. Provincial election committees received a monthly budget and materials from headquarters, such as posters and manifestos, while smaller posters and pamphlets were generated within the provinces.51 The election committees in KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape had to obtain approval for their specialized provincial campaign plans, but afterward ran their provincial campaigns relatively distinctly from the national organization. The party deployed national leaders (cabinet ministers, NCOP leaders, etc.) to supplement the mobilization efforts, with specific targeting of particular ethnic and religious groups, as well as the private sector. Concluding Remarks ANC leaders had watched their liberation party predecessors in other African countries fall prey to ethnic factionalism in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and they knew well that the same could happen to them once apartheid had been overcome. Therefore, most of the mechanisms that the party developed to protect itself aimed to safeguard the organization from these same pressures. As a ruling party, the ANC became a master at manipulating political institutions and political discourse, maintaining strategic alliances to protect its support base, and preventing other parties from seeking to activate the latent ethnic cleavages that could have potentially shattered the party’s electoral coalition. The ANC shaped political institutions and national legislation to provide it with the tools, such as strong party discipline and centralized control over the political fortunes of party members, that would insulate it from centripetal pressures. For those political institutions that the party had been forced to accept during the negotiated transition, the ANC used its position at the helm of South African government to shape their evolution to conform more closely to the ANC’s core principles, and serve the function of providing a bulwark against splintering and factionalism. One of the party’s main goals was to restrict the supply of ethnic mobilization by making it more difficult and less in the interests of other parties and political entrepreneurs. The party also developed other mechanisms to preserve its status, maintain internal cohesion, and diffuse the potential for ethnic mobilization. Central among these have been its maintenance of a strategic alliance with the SACP and COSATU, and the party’s manipulation of political discourse to reinforce the social cleavage between blacks and whites, intentionally making it more difficult to mobilize ethnic


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and class groups. The ANC also ran a formidable electoral machine, relentlessly demonizing virtually all opposition to government policy as racist and antitransformation, and actively co-opting the emerging middle and upper classes while at the same time pacifying the leftist worker and trade unions. By using these methods to protect its dominant position in South African politics, the ANC lessened the likelihood that other parties would be able to activate lines of mobilization that might fragment the party’s support base. Chief among these potential strategies would be to play the ethnic card, for the ANC’s support base has always been a mix of ethnic and racial constituencies, pieced together despite their widely divergent material conditions and interests. The main result of all this is that South African politics has been increasingly dominated at all levels (national, provincial, local, and in civil society) by the ruling ANC.52 This has made democracy much more stable and the prospects of ethnic mobilization and violence much less likely. Unlike Rwanda, where similarly stable results have been achieved by a government that represses free speech and frequently harasses or jails critics (in the name of unity), the South African government has not had to explicitly outlaw ethnic campaigning or repress critics and opposition candidates. Stability and ethnic harmony have been the byproducts of the party’s attempts to preserve its hegemony through completely legal means. For their part, opposition parties contributed to this stability because they have not attempted to break into the party’s support base by activating the political awareness of the multiple ethnic groups within the ruling party or exploiting the lines of division that exist within it. In many other countries, the opposition would have played the ethnic card before attempting any other strategy, and the results could have been violent. The next three chapters present the argument for the reason why the major opposition parties of the first democratic decade, the DP/DA, NNP and IFP, rejected the lure of ethnic mobilization.


Chapter 6

The New National Party: Transforming into Irrelevance

A

t the dawn of the postapartheid era, the National Party (NP) faced a radically different environment than the ANC.1 The former ruling party could not structure state institutions as it wished, and had to work largely within the constraints set by the large ruling coalition of the ANC and the provisions of the interim constitution. The NP had been able to insert a few of its key principles into the new constitution, including federalism and the constitutional protection of minority rights, but for the most part, it had been unable to craft the full consociational system that would have given it minority veto rights in the new political order. After the transition, the NP faced two immediate difficulties: it no longer had access to the patronage resources that it had commanded since 1948, and it had to learn how to operate in government as an opposition force rather than as the ruling party. As the party adapted to the new political dispensation, it made many strategic decisions that were conditioned by both the institutional structures and the social cleavages in the country. These choices led the Nats to attempt to broaden the party’s constituency and reject its traditional role representing white Afrikaners. The party could have reached out to black South Africans, an approach that, in the long term, might have led it to build a representative support base that could bequeath the party more legitimacy, or remained the preserve of white Afrikanerdom, playing to its traditional base. Instead, in pursuit of national power and in an attempt to curb the ANC’s political strength, the NNP sought to mobilize support among multiple communities through a nonracial, nonethnic ideological platform of social and economic conservatism. The party saw this as the best way to curb the power of the ANC and to increase its

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own influence at the national level. Therefore, the NNP attempted to build a broad coalition of people who were united by similar material and ideological interests. The party also attempted to avoid becoming a regional power. The NNP eventually failed to build a national base; after the 1999 elections it was reduced to a regional force, and by 2004, support for the party virtually disappeared. The first section of this chapter traces the strategic decisions made by the NNP between 1994 and 2004, demonstrating that there were several turning points at which the party could have chosen alternate paths that would have either maintained the traditional pattern of ethnic mobilization or shifted to one of explicit multiethnic mobilization (i.e., positioning the party to represent minority racial communities). Instead, because it desired national relevance with enough influence to challenge the ANC, the party eventually settled on a strategy that attempted to transition it into a nonracial, ideologically based organization. The second section of the chapter shows how the choices the party made in electoral campaigns continued to react to the overarching incentive structure. Ultimately, these choices caused the NNP to turn away from ethnic to ideological mobilization, as it attempted to transform into a broad, multiracial, ideological organization based on socially conservative, Christian-Democratic principles. These strategies failed to win the NNP a growing support base, leading the party into a series of alliance and coalition attempts after 1999 that alienated its few remaining supporters. Ultimately, these failed strategies caused such a massive drop in electoral support that the party disbanded in 2005. Brief Background of the New National Party The National Party dominated South African government without interruption from 1948 to 1994. In the forty-six years of NP rule, the party won eleven all-white elections and three referenda. The bedrock of Nationalist rule was the apartheid system of race-based segregation, which was grounded in a belief in the supremacy of the Afrikaner nation and a philosophy that each cultural community in the territory of South Africa could be best served through separate administrations and control over their “own affairs.” The apartheid system reached its peak in the 1960s and 1970s, with the wholesale resettlement of millions of people into nominally independent “homelands,” and virtually complete segregation of the races in all aspects of social and cultural life. During the early 1980s, the growing militancy of the antiapartheid movement had forced the Nationalist government to declare a

T H E N N P : T R A N S F O R M I N G I N T O I R R E L E VA N C E

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state of emergency to suppress most forms of internal dissent. The creation of a police state failed to prevent the slow erosion of the state’s power and legitimacy, and by the end of the decade, a combination of domestic and international factors compelled the Nationalist leader F. W. de Klerk to initiate secret negotiations with imprisoned leaders of the ANC on the prospects for reaching a settlement with the antiapartheid forces.2 By the time that de Klerk lifted the ban on the African National Congress and other liberation organizations in a surprise speech on February 2, 1990, the NP had positioned itself to retain a considerable degree of influence over the transition process. By initiating the transition when the party still controlled the state and its resources (particularly the police and South African Defense Force), de Klerk enabled the NP to retain some control over the transition process and to become the most significant of the negotiating partners during the drafting of the interim constitution under which South Africa achieved its second independence in 1994. Considering its history, the NP performed relatively well in the 1994 “liberation elections.” Winning 20.55 percent of the vote and eighty-two seats in the National Assembly, the Nationalists became the second largest party in South Africa. The NP polled well in excess of the 10 percent of the vote necessary under the provisions of the transitional arrangements to earn representation in the Government of National Unity (GNU), and thus was able to nominate an executive deputy president (F. W. de Klerk) and six (out of twenty-seven) cabinet ministers.3 It won control of the Western Cape government with 53.2 percent of the vote, and in seven other provinces became the second largest party after the ANC.4 In this election, the NP even succeeded in deracializing its support base somewhat: after 1994, the party’s electoral base was 49 percent white, 30 percent Coloured, 14 percent African, and 7 percent Indian.5 Postapartheid Politics: Debating the Future of the Party After the 1994 elections, the NP was immediately faced with two sets of issues that ultimately proved fatal to the party. First of all, it had to carve out a role for itself as an opposition force. Nationalist politicians had a great deal of political experience, but only as members of a dominant ruling party at the head of a racially based political system. The party not only needed to define an ideology that would suit its position as a member of a nonracial government, but it also had to quickly learn the practical tactics of participating in government as an

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opposition force. At the same time, the party’s ability to learn the opposition role was complicated by the fact that, as a member of the GNU, it was unclear whether the party really was an oppositional force. Second was a set of issues related to the party’s identity: should it continue to consolidate its support among the Coloured and white voters who constituted nearly 80 percent of the party’s vote in 1994, or should it seek to broaden its appeal and reach out to the considerable pool of Africans whose views were more politically conservative than the left-leaning ANC? Disagreements over who the party should target tended to exacerbate long-standing internal divisions between the party’s two regional strongholds, one in the Transvaal and the other in the Cape, as many leaders from the former advocated an opening up of the NNP’s ranks, while the latter desired to consolidate amongst Afrikaners. Aspects of South Africa’s institutional and constitutional structure, particularly the antidefection clause, influenced the party’s eventual decision to shift its rhetoric and ideology to a vague Christian-Democratic counterpoint to the ANC’s liberalism, while maintaining an organizational base grounded in the minority communities. The NP had a difficult time positioning itself in the postapartheid political landscape. The party’s participation in the GNU created so many difficulties for the party that a crisis situation developed almost immediately after the GNU began operating.6 Even though the NP was too junior a partner in the GNU to exert much influence, the party’s supporters held it responsible for government actions and policies that many considered inimical to their interests. At the same time that the NP’s participation in government created this dissatisfaction among its supporters, the party was also unable to find a niche within the ranks of the opposition. The NP could not act as an aggressive oppositional force and condemn the government’s actions when formally it played a role in shaping those actions. The party’s cooperative relationship with the ANC during the constitutional negotiations had already generated dissatisfaction within the part leadership’s conservatives. They thought that chief negotiator Roelf Meyer had taken too conciliatory an approach and had compromised too many of the NP’s principles.7 During the second half of 1995, Nationalist leaders as well as the rank-and-file supporters of the party became increasingly vocal about their disquiet with these compromises and with the executive’s friendly relationship with its ANC colleagues. The NP leadership initially attempted to find a solution to these problems by shifting its ideology and attempting to separate itself from


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its association with the GNU. Since the party controlled the Western Cape provincial government, it could have withdrawn from the GNU and attempted to build a profile as an effective regional force in select provinces: Gauteng, Western Cape, Northern Cape, and Free State. In its first attempt to reposition itself in postapartheid politics, instead of embracing its regional strengths, however, the NP retained its national focus and tried to shift its ideological orientation. In February 1996 the party announced that it would become a nonracial, Christian-Democratic political organization. Since the ANC’s post-1994 economic policies had encroached upon the NP’s traditional positions, the NP needed a different approach to conservatism. Family values and respect for religion, contrasted against the ANC’s secularism, provided an ideological hook for the party. Thus, the party’s new core values were structured around freedoms (religious, political, economic, individual, and cultural) and a preference for strong federalism. The NP saw itself at the forefront of creating a nonracial, value-driven party, not unlike the Christian Democratic Union in Germany, with the potential to capture the loyalties of the silent majority of relatively conservative South Africans. This shift made the NP the first ever Christian-Democratic party to form in South Africa, but it also brought the policy platform of the National Party closer to that of the Democratic Party (DP).8 At the same time, the NP’s continuing participation in the GNU constrained its repositioning efforts. Just as the evolving platform of the ANC made it difficult for the NP to position itself further to the right of the ANC, the NP also encountered problems selling the party as a genuine opposition force. The party could not convincingly present itself as a strong opposition and alternative to the ANC while also participating in government. Therefore, the day after the NP voted to pass the new constitution, May 8, 1996, it quit the government, pulling NP members out of all cabinet posts they held in the national and provincial governments not controlled by the NP. The party maintained its focus on national-level influence, and still rejected the option of concentrating on its Gauteng and Western Cape provincial power bases. Instead, de Klerk pledged that the NP would become a strong parliamentary opposition party: “supporting government when we agree, but constructively criticising government when they err, always putting forward a clear alternative.” 9 When de Klerk retired in 1997, his elected successor, Marthinus van Schalkwyk, set the party on a course to become a centrist party among the rightof-center parties, with national ambitions to attract a diverse support base.10 In 1998, the NP launched its new identity as the “New”

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National Party (New NP, NNP), with new colors to accompany its new name. Identity Crisis De Klerk’s decision to pull out of the GNU in May 1996 represented one part of the party’s response to its identity crisis in postapartheid South Africa. Embracing a Christian-Democratic ideology and withdrawing from the GNU resolved the problem of what role the party should play in postapartheid South Africa, but left unresolved who the party should represent. Ever since the transition, the party had been undergoing a prolonged and intense debate over its identity: who should it represent and what interests should it champion? One faction of the party, led by Executive Director Marthinus van Schalkwyk and Western Cape leader Hernus Kriel, seized upon the fact that the NP had won nearly 80 percent of its support from whites and Coloureds and argued that the party should continue to consolidate its support within these groups. The other side, led by Meyer, felt that they party should move closer to African supporters, seeking to fill the political void facing conservative Africans. The feeling among many of the party’s more progressive elements was that the party was too white to become a viable political force in the “new” South Africa.11 When the party restructured itself in 1996, many thought this would provide the chance to move in a more multiracial direction, and in fact there were indications that the party leadership intended to court black voters. Roelf Meyer left his cabinet position to become the first ever secretary-general of the NP, specifically tasked with heading a restructuring effort that would enable the party to attract more supporters. The restructuring team felt that for the party to genuinely become the focus for a Christian-Democratic, center-right opposition to the ANC, the NP would have to shed its exclusive ethnic appeal to Afrikaners. Meyer was public and outspoken in his assertions that the only course open to the party was for it to widen its appeal and embrace black South Africans. In the restructuring process, the team argued, the party should adopt a balanced approach by becoming actively involved in all communities countrywide, but “particularly in Black communities where [the NP had] virtually no presence.”12 As part of this process, reformists suggested that the party might have no choice but to change its name and become a new entity in the eyes of South Africa’s voters.13 Resistance to the Meyer faction came in many forms, but most blatantly through public attacks on Meyer and the continued poor


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representation of nonwhites in the party leadership. Despite Meyer’s repeated statements that the party would target blacks in its reorientation effort, throughout 1996 the party elevated only one new African member to a prominent position. The few highly placed nonwhites in the party ranks, such as John Mavuso, Patrick MacKenzie, and David Malatsi, remained the core of the party’s nonwhite leadership.14 Therefore, while the party officially embraced nonracialism, the party hierarchy remained “overwhelmingly White, male, middleaged and Afrikaans speaking.”15 The party’s sluggishness to advance black members soon began to undermine the reform efforts, indicating that not even de Klerk, who had initiated the restructuring effort, supported Meyer’s proposals. As the Nats promised transformation but failed to implement any significant changes, a series of high-profile resignations rocked the party, severely weakening it in the eyes of both Afrikaners and Africans. Between January and August 1996, many progressives left either the party or active politics, or both, and the party lost several of its few prominent nonwhite members.16 Return to Laager Politics If the party had had any genuine chance of winning support among black South Africans and of regaining the loyalty of the millions of whites disgusted by the disclosures before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearings, it would have had to undergo a genuine transformation.17 Meyer and his supporters felt that disbanding the party and creating a new political formation was the only way to save the National Party. Pursuing an ideological shift and making grand statements about Africanizing the party’s support base would not save the party from sinking into irrelevance. The move to disband the NP and regroup as a different entity came to a head during the party’s Federal Congress in May 1997, when a number of party leaders formally raised the suggestion. The Federal Executive, the highest decision-making body in the National Party, was divided over the issue: five of the nine provincial NP leaders and the party’s executive director, van Schalkwyk, were against disbanding. Ultimately the party leadership rejected this route. After party leaders came away from the congress, they issued statements that clearly backtracked from the position the NP had taken throughout 1996 about the “urgent” need to create a completely new political organization capable of breaking the mold of South African politics. Instead, the Federal Executive stated that there were three possible

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opposition realignment options: (1) a loose election agreement among existing parties and formations; (2) a more formal alliance among parties; and (3) the establishment of a new political movement that would lead to the eventual formation of a new political party.18 The option to disband and regroup had been shelved entirely. In making this decision, Nationalist leaders had been explicitly considering the problems posed by the antidefection clause.19 The Meyer approach was “too abrupt . . . a radical change would hurt too many people and their families,” since so many MPs, members of provincial legislatures (MPLs) and local councilors would suddenly be out of jobs.20 Even those who in principle supported Meyer’s proposals did not advocate them, for much the same reasons.21 In these dynamics, the institutional prohibition of party defections came to exert an extremely powerful influence over one of the most important decisions that the leaders of the National Party had to make. After the congress concluded, de Klerk disbanded the task force in charge of restructuring, and Meyer resigned from the NP. Most of Meyer’s supporters, the liberal elements of the NP who favored reaching out to black South Africans, followed suit. By the time of F. W. de Klerk’s retirement in August of that year, most of the members who had sought reform in the party had left. 22 Meyer’s resignation and the ensuing liberal exodus enabled the party to gain a semblance of unity that it had been unable to attain since the 1994 transition. At this point the NNP did shift mobilization strategies: it decided to explicitly seek and consolidate support among Afrikaners and Coloureds, with the Western Cape branches of the party driving the renewed efforts. Embracing Coloureds as a major constituency of the NNP stood in stark contrast to the explicit white-Afrikaner background of the Nationalist Party. It also represented a tweak on traditional themes; Coloureds were thought to share Afrikaner core values (family and religion) and many spoke Afrikaans as a home language. The shift was less extreme than if the party had chosen to court black (African) supporters at that point in time. The logic of this decision was also that these were both large constituencies and, if amalgamated, could deliver a significant share of the national vote to the party and keep it a nationally relevant political organization. If the party could cement Coloured and Afrikaner support, it had a chance to retain its position as the leader of the opposition. By putting itself on this course, however, the NNP foreclosed the opportunity to develop ties to African supporters, the only way the party could genuinely challenge the ANC’s dominance in the


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long term. By the end of 1997, with the election of conservative van Schalkwyk to head the party, it was clear that the Nationalists had backed away from the precipice, drawn their wagons together, and returned to the familiar route of laager politics, though with a new definition of the volk. As they traveled this route, the antidefection clause proved one of the more powerful institutionally based factors shaping the party’s choices at the major junctures. The “New” National Party: Losing Ground As the NNP began to look ahead to the 1999 elections, the situation did not bode well for its prospects to remain the largest opposition party. In mid-1997, the NNP began to lose the endorsement of white South Africans in its strongholds in Gauteng and the Western Cape as its supporters began to flock to the DP. Once the DP began to win over the loyalties of white South Africans, and as opinion polls increasingly confirmed the steep decline in support for the NP, the party was unable to retain many of its leaders. Compounding the problem, as the campaign period for the 1999 elections drew near, competing parties capitalized on opportunities provided by the candidate list process to seduce away many of the NNP’s campaign organizers and influential leaders. With the precipitous decline in the NNP’s predicted electoral fortunes it could not guarantee that the candidates on its lists would become elected to the country’s legislatures, and in the face of this uncertainty, many of its members defected to “safer” positions on the lists of parties performing more favorably. In turn, the defections created organizational difficulties at both the leadership and branch levels that especially weakened the party as it attempted to put its house in order for the 1999 election. Declining White Support In the period between 1994 and 1999, the NP lost approximately half its supporters throughout the country and 40 percent in the Western Cape, the party’s most important stronghold.23 The Afrikaner establishment, which throughout the party’s history had provided the NP with moral legitimacy and intellectual leadership, had withdrawn its unconditional support in 1996 when Nasionale Pers (National Papers, the owner of most Afrikaans-language media) for the first time ever donated money to the ANC and the DP. The criticisms of Afrikaner elites and newspapers increased over the next two years.24

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The party’s adoption of a centrist approach and its decision to court the Coloured vote not only earned the defection of moderates, but it also failed to stem losses among conservative supporters. Despite the party’s return to minority-based politics, conservative white supporters began to desert the Nationalists for political organizations such as the Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP) and the Vryheidsfront/ Freedom Front (VF/FF). The conservative elements had already been disappointed by the concessions the party had made during constitutional negotiations in 1994 and 1995 over the issues of power sharing and provincial powers. The party’s public debate over broadening its appeals to court African voters had alienated this group further. Despite the party’s ultimate rejection of the proposal, hardcore Afrikaner conservatives remained unconvinced that the NNP, which had proved a pragmatic chameleon since 1994, would stick by their interests as the political climate continued to change. The demand for an Afrikaner political organization was still there, but the NNP had ceased to provide the supply. Yet it was not until mid-1998 that the disenchantment with the NNP began to surface in the results of municipal by-elections.25 Until this point, even though opinion polls had indicated a massive dealignment with the NNP, the disaffected had not transferred their support to alternative parties. The first tangible signs that former NNP supporters were beginning to line up behind other parties came in three by-elections in May 1998. These elections, which otherwise would have been of little note, became important because the DP won seats that previously had gone to the Nats. In one instance, an election in the southern Johannesburg suburb of Rosettenville, the DP polled 89 percent in a ward that the NNP had previously described as its “safest seat in the country.”26 The day before the Rosettenville election, the NNP had lost in a traditional stronghold in the Western Cape, again to the DP. Finally, in Brakpan, a conservative suburb of Johannesburg in the East Rand, the NNP again lost, this time polling the lowest out of all the contenders in the municipal by-election, with 10 percent of the vote to the DP’s 88 percent. 27 The Nats downplayed the losses, claiming that the Brakpan loss had been due to “a handful of AWB [Afrikaner Weerstandbeweging] supporters [who] were seen lining up to vote for the DP.”28 Yet the Nats were beginning to lose ground in Coloured communities as well. In another by-election in May 1998, for example, the NNP managed to poll only twenty-two votes in a mixed Coloured and African ward in the Western Cape town of Bloekombos. In these and other municipal elections, the Nats experienced heavy losses in its two most important regions, the Western Cape and Gauteng.


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Organizational Difficulties and Defections The organizational difficulties that the Nationalists had tried to resolve in mid-1997, when Meyer resigned and van Schalkwyk returned, continued intermittently to plague the party. Immediately following Meyer’s resignation, the party had a brief period of relative unity, but tensions between liberals and conservatives soon resurfaced. The divisions were particularly severe in the Western Cape, where, at one point, rival party caucuses operated within the provincial branches. On one side were party conservatives, who thought the party should begin to position itself for an election campaign in 1999 that revisited its 1994 swart gevaar (black peril) tactics, playing up to the white and Coloured minority groups’ fears that they would lose out to Africans in housing, employment opportunities, and affirmative action. On the other side were the liberals, headed by NNP leaders Peter Marais and Patrick McKenzie, who felt that the party needed to prove to the Coloured community that it had their interests at heart and to stop encouraging divisions between Coloured and black South Africans in the province. To do this, the party would need to promote a nonwhite leader to head the provincial party, and to turn away from the tactics of the 1994 campaign. The divisions between these two camps became so severe that at one point it was rumored that, should the liberal side lose the battle to control the province, most of those members were ready to defect to the ANC.29 Given that this party had sustained itself since the early 1990s by making strategic compromises when necessary, it was not surprising that in the end it attempted to placate both sides by maintaining a strategic focus on consolidating support among minority groups through swart gevaar tactics, while electing a pliable Coloured leader, Gerald Morkel, to head the Western Cape province when provincial leader and Premier Hernus Kriel retired in April 1998. Though many in the province disliked the choice of Morkel, his election pacified those agitating for a nonwhite provincial leader. Elevating Morkel to the premiership also allowed the national leadership to retain control over provincial decision making, especially regarding the party’s upcoming decision to wage the 1999 elections on a swart gevaar platform. The other candidate to head the provincial party, Peter Marais, would not have been as easily dominated by national leadership as Morkel, and had much closer ties to the ANC. Electing Marais to the premiership would not have guaranteed for the national leadership that the party would adhere to the swart gevaar strategy. Nevertheless, based on the workings of the party-list system, the NNP thought

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they could portray Marais as a future leader in the province, and therefore use Marais’ oratory skill and charisma to generate support within the Coloured communities of Cape Town. Yet just as the NNP was able to appease the liberal-conservative conflict within the Western Cape, another organizational problem arose owing to the candidate list nature of the electoral system. Between election periods, candidates could defect from one party to another, but the antidefection clause required the receiving party to remove one of its own legislators if the defector expected to remain in his or her parliamentary position. This feature restrained the number of national and provincial-level defections between 1994 and mid1998, but the pace of defections increased drastically from late 1998 onward. The same process occurred in advance of the 2004 elections, with the “defections season” beginning in late 2003 when registration for the electoral voters’ rolls opened. In each electoral period, as the end of the legislative term drew near and politicians anticipated reelection to parliaments and legislatures under new party banners within a few months, they began to switch parties. This would minimize the income they would lose for defecting from their old parties and legislative positions. This game of courting defections and staging public defection ceremonies had been a hallmark of South African politics since the 1999 election. The ANC had courted NNP leaders early in the 1999 campaign, with particular focus on the party’s organization in its strongest province, the Western Cape. The same process was repeated ahead of the 2004 elections, as the ANC courted leaders from both the NNP and the DA. A key component of the ANC’s long-term strategy in the Western Cape had entailed enticing defectors from the NNP, both to cripple the party’s organization and to improve the ANC’s standing within the Coloured community. In 1999, the ANC focused on just the NNP, but in 2004, it targeted the DA as well. Through these efforts, the ANC in particular, but also other parties, dealt a crippling blow to the NNP’s internal party organizational capabilities as it attempted to prepare for the 1999 election campaign.30 In 2004, the ANC did not target the NNP in this manner, because the parties had entered into a preelection governance pact, but the DA engaged in the same tactics and aggressively pursued NNP members. There is ample evidence that targeted defections significantly weakened the NNP. For example, by the time that the voter registration process was drawing to a close in early 1999, the Nats were expressing serious concerns about retaining their core supporters in


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the Platteland. For the first time in its history, the Democratic Party was campaigning in this core NNP area, and the Nationalists worried about losses to both the DP and the Freedom Front. Party sources reported that they were experiencing problems identifying suitable candidates because of dwindling support at branch levels, especially within the party’s rural support base.31 As the election campaign was gearing up for the final push in April 1999, opinion polls estimated that the NNP should expect to gain no more than one-quarter of the vote it had received in 1994, down from the halving of support that opinion polls had predicted until that point.32 How, exactly, did the NNP confront this scenario? Election Strategies: Orchestrating the Demise of the Party When deciding on campaign strategies and themes, NNP organizers continuously chose defensive strategies that built on the choices made in late 1997. In both 1999 and 2004, the party chose not to base strategies on the reality that it had been reduced to a primarily regional force, which would have led it to mount a broad-based, inclusive campaign geared to win over large sections of voters from all the racial groups in its two strongest provinces, Gauteng and the Western Cape. Instead, in both electoral periods the NNP sought to draw nationwide strength by appealing to racial minority communities in all provinces, focusing on whites and Coloureds in particular. Attempting to retain national influence, the party thus spread its increasingly scarce financial and human resources across the whole country, rather than concentrating on the regions in which it remained strong. The institutional considerations that had conditioned the NNP’s decision to maintain a course of minority-based mobilization in 1996–1997 operated even more strongly during the election campaigns, as that strategy could have potentially enabled the party to remain the second largest party behind the ANC. When drafting campaign strategies, the party explicitly took into account the electoral system, socioeconomic structure, and demographic distribution of potential supporters, and sought to secure pockets of support spread throughout the country from groups who could be appealed to without obviously race-based advertisements and messages. In both elections, the party’s goal was to mobilize nationally important constituencies to deliver significant national-level returns. The party consistently rejected regionally focused mobilization and campaigns, even when it was obvious that the party’s strength had been confined

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to only certain areas of the country. These choices demonstrated how the party consistently reacted to the nationalizing pressures of the institutional system. Mobilization Strategies The NNP set two national goals in for the June 1999 elections: to end ANC dominance by preventing the ANC from attaining a twothirds majority in the National Assembly, and to maintain veto power in the National Council of Provinces (NCOP). The NNP asserted that if it failed in these goals, the ANC would be able to unilaterally amend the constitution and then there would be no check on its abuse of power. Implicitly, the party also aimed to remain the second largest political party in South Africa, though, unlike the Democratic Party, it did not make this the focus of its public campaign appeals. In accordance with the NNP’s strategic choice in 1997 to focus on Afrikaners and Coloureds, campaign themes and priorities were designed to appeal more to minority than African voters. The party stressed mobilizing minority voters in all provinces, making a point to have national leaders attend rallies in every province. This focus on minority voters, along with the strategic focus the party had adopted in 1997, had the potential to deliver the most votes, since the members of the minority race groups also constituted the bulk of the very large undecided vote—the potential swing voters. By early 1999, rates of independence were highest among the groups who had most severely dealigned from the NNP since 1994: whites, Coloureds, and Indian South Africans. These groups, spread throughout the country, also concentrated in four provinces: the Western Cape, Northern Cape, Gauteng, and KwaZulu-Natal. Taking stock of where potential supporters lived and the desire to maintain veto power in the NCOP, the NNP decided to set provincial targets that would enable it to better effect national goals. Accordingly, New National Party strategists announced that, after the 1999 elections, the NNP wanted to win control of the Western Cape and Northern Cape outright and to hold the balance of power in Gauteng and KwaZulu-Natal. While these goals may seem to run counter to the more general argument in this study that the major parties did not wage campaigns to win control over provincial governments, the analysis shows that, in reality, the particular provinces chosen as targets were selected because targeting the large minority populations residing in them would increase the overall national share of the vote, even if these strategies often would not help the party win outright


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control over the province. The ultimate goal was to increase representation at the national level and prevent the ANC from controlling the NCOP. The national-level imperatives were important because they affected the types of coalitions that the NNP attempted to put together in its election campaign and the messages that it issued. Campaign Rhetoric In the 1999 campaign, the Nationalists championed a number of issues that appealed primarily to voters from the minority groups. The first half of the campaign season was dominated by two issues that most South Africans considered to affect predominantly white, Coloured, and Indian communities: the use of bar-coded identity documents for voter registration and the right of overseas voters to cast ballots in the election.33 By the time that the elections got fully under way in mid1999, the imprint left by the early focus on these two issues predisposed many African voters to view the remaining campaign with skepticism. Despite the party’s repeated statements that it stood for the interests of all South Africans and that it had the most representative support base of any party, actions spoke louder than words. The majority of issues that the NNP took up both during the registration period and later in the campaign, revolving around crime, the economy, and education, reinforced the impression that the party stood for minority interests and the defense of existing privileges. The NNP designed its 1999 campaign themes and messages to resonate primarily with minority group voters worried about declining conditions and their tenuous future in South African society. The party also included just enough attention to job creation and unemployment to enable it to claim to be making broad appeals to all South Africans. The New NP trumpeted that it had prioritized five major issues in its campaign for the 1999 elections: crime, job creation and the economy, education, inclusive government, and localism. The party most often focused on the first three, driving home the slogans “no mercy for criminals,” “job creation through free market policies,” and “quality education” in speeches, campaign tours, and election meetings across the country.34 Opposition to affirmative action policies and the Employment Equity Act, not mentioned by campaign managers as one of the major campaign themes, nevertheless figured prominently in many NNP campaign speeches and messages.35 Of equal importance with these concrete campaign themes was the message that South Africans needed to stop the ANC. According to the NNP, the ANC’s “better life for all” had in fact turned out to be

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a better life for a few, and the new ANC was becoming the old NP, a self-engrossed party serving the needs of only one group.36 An ANC two-thirds majority would enable it to change the constitution, trample the rights of minorities, and to follow the path that Zimbabwe had taken twenty years earlier. Thus, voters were reminded, “Mugabe has two-thirds,” and they were told to stem vir jou kinders (“vote for your children”—always in Afrikaans). An ANC two-thirds majority was also thought to endanger private property. This represented another reference not only to Zimbabwe, but also to the ANC’s alliance with the South African Communist Party (SACP), revisiting the NP’s 1994 campaign’s emphasis on the ANC-Communist threat. The party tailored the messages to appeal to minority voters in both subtle and obvious ways. Often, the message was transmitted simply through the order of priorities in the NNP’s election manifesto and its campaign speeches, as well as in the types of solutions offered for the problems that the NNP identified. The way the party dealt with crime serves as prime example of these dynamics. First of all, the NNP spent far more time dealing with the problems of crime and personal security than on jobs. Job creation proposals were included as one portion of its overall economic package, and would be the by-product of the economic growth that the NNP promised. While both jobs and crime were the top two most important problems cited by all South Africans in November 1998, 55 percent of white South Africans cited crime among the top problems that government should address, as opposed to 15 percent who prioritized jobs. The proportions among black South Africans were the exact opposite.37 Second, the NNP’s policy proposals to combat crime appealed more to minority voters than to African South Africans. The NNP’s approach to the crime issue focused on policies oriented toward punishing criminals and offered a “zero tolerance” approach to combat the spread of crime. The two main NNP posters on this issue screamed “Hang murderers and rapists” and “No mercy for criminals,” both direct attacks on the ANC’s defense of criminals’ rights and opposition to the death penalty. White South Africans, particularly concerned about personal security and rising crime, would respond to the emphasis on punishment rather than prevention. In contrast, parties like the ANC, IFP, and PAC focused on the underlying causes that created the situation in which so many people became criminals in the first place, such as unemployment and the breakdown of social ties caused by apartheid-era distortions in the labor market that had led to a degeneration of morality.


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In the 2004 campaigns, the NNP’s rhetoric and goals were more moderate. The overall campaign slogan for the party, “You deserve a fair share—Let us be your voice,” was designed to transmit messages of influence and inclusivity. The party promised to deepen democracy, encourage citizen participation, and deliver accountability, while improving service delivery and fiscal discipline.38 In the 2004 campaign, instead of strongly criticizing the ANC as it had in 1999, the NNP attempted to portray itself as a constructive opposition force that would work with the governing ANC to make the needs of its constituencies heard. To this end, the party pledged that it would work with the ANC in any provincial governments in which neither party had earned a majority (they had in mind Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal). Being in coalition with the ANC would allow the NNP to actually pursue its programs, the party argued. Party leader van Schalkwyk told supporters in the Western Cape that “the time for NNP supporters to be ‘at the back of the queue,’ whether for housing or welfare, was over. . . . In opposition one could not build a house, or appoint a policeman or woman or build a school.”39 That was why the NNP had to be part of the government, ensuring that party leaders could fight for their supporters’ rights, just as the ANC would fight for the rights of its members. “As a result of our agreement with the ANC we are also part of decision-making in government. We work together to find solutions. The NNP is the only party that successfully promotes the interests of, and co-operation between, all communities.”40 The NNP’s 2004 campaign themes on substantive issues largely continued in the same tradition as the 1999 campaign. The party targeted minority communities with messages about “no mercy for criminals,” the need for more policemen, and improving education and investment in South Africa. The party raised issues pertaining to investment, jobs, skills training, social security, and poverty alleviation, in addition to other issues. But the bulk of the campaign rhetoric focused on nonissue-based appeals to inclusivity and representation. The party’s major national election goals, as stated by Van Schalkwyk at the beginning of the campaign season, included sharing the government in KwaZulu-Natal so that the NNP could help bring stability to the province; being a significant political force in all nine provinces; maximizing the party’s vote so it could represent all its supporters; improving the party’s position as one of South Africa’s four major political parties; and demonstrating that the sharing of the government by all the different parties was better than the “fight-back style of opposition.”41 Voters were told that Westminster-style opposition

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was not appropriate for “complicated societies” such as South Africa. These types of themes constituted the bulk of the party’s overall campaign message, and yet none of these would qualify as a traditionally conceived “issue.” The party had lost focus, and its ideological positioning of the mid-1990s had disappeared from much of the campaign rhetoric by early 2004. In this sense, the 2004 election campaign also revealed how much the party had been weakened. The election campaign produced muddled messages without a clear meaning, and voters did not know for what the party stood. Posters in the Western Cape told voters to “make your NNP vote count,” but, as one analyst questioned, “count for what?”42 Presumably the NNP meant that supporting the party did not waste one’s vote, since the party’s alliance with the ANC meant that ideas of the NNP carried weight with the ruling party. This strategy left the party open to the obvious question: if this were the case, why not just vote directly for the ANC? The DA campaigns were quick to point out this logical flaw. The alliance with the ANC in the Western Cape, KwaZulu-Natal, and other provinces also alienated the NNP’s youthful Coloured vote, whose historical support for the NNP was as much a rejection of the ANC as a symptom of genuine support of the NNP. Further demonstrating that the NNP was still not targeting African voters was the fact that, in both campaigns, the party spent almost as much as or more effort campaigning against other opposition parties as against the ANC. During interviews with NNP campaign strategists in 1999, it was clear from what they discussed that while official campaign rhetoric was oriented against the ANC, in their minds the Democrats were the biggest threat. By 2004 the NNP had publicly identified the DA as “enemy number one.”43 In both 1999 and 2004, the NNP created posters explicitly against the DA, calling it rightwing, racist, and standing for those who already have jobs.44 Reports such as the following were also extremely common: “Van Schalkwyk said it was precisely because of the knowledge that the coalition would remain that the NNP was able to propose implementable plans, unlike the ‘pie in the sky promises’ made by other parties.”45 The overall goal of both campaigns was to reduce the ANC’s dominance in parliament and to maximize support nationwide to remain a nationally significant player. The NNP explicitly rejected the strategy of mounting campaigns in only specific regions, despite the fact that, by late 2003, it was clear that the party’s supporters were concentrated in just a few provinces. The party’s electoral campaigns prioritized national issues over local and pursued a block of voters that might


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deliver nationally significant results in the short term, but that closed it off from reaching into the black majority in the longer term. It did this to maintain a balance of power in the NCOP, to attempt to remain relevant in the National Assembly, and to stay on the national political scene as a major player. Whether or not the party met these goals— and most would agree that they did not—was not as important as the fact that the party made strategic choices that pushed it into these strategies, and that these choices were conditioned by the institutional incentives that nationalized power and permitted pooling of votes under the PR electoral system. Conclusion This analysis of the NNP’s strategic choices between1994 and 2004 has attempted to demonstrate the ways in which the party responded to the various incentives generated by both political cleavages and the sociopolitical context of the country. South Africa’s political system, particularly the nationalization of power, the permissiveness of the PR electoral system, and the nature of social cleavages, established an institutional framework that disincentivized monoethnic and small group mobilization strategies. Parties could win seats without geographically delimited support bases and needed to gain significant influence at the national level to have any influence over important governmental processes, and so they looked to mobilize large support blocks, rather than small ethnic groupings. Thus, the NNP turned away from exclusive Afrikaner mobilization, but not so far as to embrace a completely multiethnic strategy. Given the NNP’s past support patterns, and in the context of a race/class overlap that provided easily mobilizable communities that shared a history of segregation that reinforced perceived differences, the NNP did not attempt to activate any of the divisions that crosscut the race groups, such as region, language, religion, and urban-rural divides. Instead, the NNP attempted to activate an ideological opposition to the ANC based on family values, respect for tradition, and economic conservatism. When this strategy failed to keep the party as a major player after 1999, the party shifted to a more explicit minoritybased strategy, and pursued various coalition options, first with the Democratic Party, and then with the ANC. In so doing, the party betrayed many of its founding principles (advancement of the Afrikaner people being the most fundamental of these), and attempted to portray itself as a guardian of all South Africans, but particularly those of the minority groups who deserved a fair share in the new order.

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Such strategies ultimately helped to perpetuate patterns of electoral support that reinforced the ANC’s strength as a dominant party, but this was an unanticipated by-product of the NNP’s attempts to remain a nationally important political party. The leaders of the NNP knew that, eventually, the party would have to broaden its support base. However, their desire to retain significant influence at the national level while important policies were still being created led party leaders to select a strategy that they thought would help to preserve the NNP’s status as the second largest party in South Africa. Mobilizing alternative groups capable of gradually building a base among African voters would not have provided the results they thought they needed: significant national-level influence in the short term. This chapter presented evidence for this argument. It demonstrated how the antidefection clause worked against party insiders who attempted to change the basic nature of the party, both in terms of the party’s name and in terms of the population segments from which the party sought support. In 1996–1997, the organization could have made a break with the past and started to pursue a genuinely diverse strategy. Instead, to avoid risking any significant losses during the critical early phase, the NNP chose to pursue minoritybased mobilization tactics. Such strategies would guarantee it the support of, at best, 25 percent of the electorate, and meant that the NNP was essentially competing against the DP, rather than against the ANC. The institutional considerations shaping the party’s decision to maintain a course of minority-based mobilization became explicit as the party began its campaign for the 1999 elections. Wracked by internal divisions, organizational problems, a leadership vacuum, and losing support in its traditional safe strongholds, the New NP faced an uphill battle as the campaign season for the 1999 elections approached. Despite opinion polls indicating that the party retained a support base only in Gauteng and the Western Cape, the NNP waged a nationwide election campaign in 1999, attempting to remain the leading opposition party in the national political arena. By 2004, when it was even clearer that the party had little support outside of a few key provinces, the party still maintained a national election machine, using scarce resources to campaign in provinces where it had little hope of securing many votes. It did this because the few votes it could pick up would contribute to the overall national total, and because the party maintained a façade of national importance that it could not bear to dispose of.


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The NNP hoped that it could position itself as an opposition force within a ruling coalition in 2004. Rather than reaching out to African voters, therefore, the NNP sought to consolidate existing levels of support and regain the loyalties of the racial minority groups that had turned away from the party since 1994. Such a strategy could potentially pay off, given the institutional structure and demographic divisions in South African society. The proportional representation system made it electorally feasible to target pockets of white and Coloured communities spread throughout the country; the unique socioeconomic positioning of each group made it possible to emphasize issues that each would find particularly salient, such as crime, affirmative action, education and language policy, without making explicit reference to race. This strategy, decided on by the NNP’s most senior leaders, ultimately created so many problems for the party that it never found stable footing in postapartheid South Africa. Once the NNP turned away from being the political representative of the Afrikaner people, it could not find a niche for itself. Its ideology and policies were not distinct from other parties; it did not appeal to a strictly delineated set of identity groups; and its tendency to form coalitions with odd bedfellows left the party without an identity, without a solid set of policies, and unable to present a strong opposition voice to the government. At its dissolution in 2005, party leader van Schalkwyk urged NNP members to join the ANC.


Chapter 7

From Democratic Party to Democratic Alliance: Mobilizing Minority Power?

While the National Party was struggling to find a place for itself in

the early years of the new South Africa, the Democratic Party (DP, or Democrats) had hit the ground running. The DP quickly regrouped after a stunning defeat in 1994 to become the largest opposition party just five years later, earning 9.86 percent of the national vote in 1999 as opposed to 1.7 percent in 1994. In 2004 the DP, renamed the Democratic Alliance (DA),1 consolidated its position as the largest and most significant opposition party by winning 12.34 percent of the national vote. In the process of constructing themselves as the main opposition force to the ANC, the Democrats changed the party’s identity from a liberal, English party to a conservative, multiracial minority-based party that has slowly begun to reach out to black voters. As with the IFP and the NNP, the Democratic Alliance rejected ethnic mobilization in favor of a more diverse approach. In this process the party moved away from exclusive appeals to its traditional English-speaking constituency; aggressively courted the Afrikaner, Coloured, and Indian voters; and changed its ideological profile to position itself to the right of the ANC. While some critics labeled this racial mobilization, it was actually a multi-racial, yet minority-focused strategy. Unlike the IFP and the NNP, the DA’s repositioning met with electoral success. Across the entire 1994–2004 period, the Democrats very consciously developed strategies in response to the institutional system, attempting to generate support that would deliver national-level representation in significant numbers in the short term. In 1999 and

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2004, this meant courting minority voters, as most campaigners felt that courting African support would be wasted. Instead, the party chose to focus on becoming the leader of the opposition in the 1999 elections and to consolidate this position in 2004. The party planned to begin to reach into the black vote from 2004 onward.2 Each of these choices reflects the influence of a system that allowed parties to generate support nationwide amongst pockets of voters and to pool those geographically distributed votes into a national tally that helped them to gain power at the crucial national tier. Brief Background of the Democratic Alliance Established in 1989 as the Democratic Party, the Democratic Alliance is a direct descendant of both the Progressive Party (Progressives) and the Progressive Federal Party, the two historical opponents of apartheid during the years of Nationalist rule. The Progressive Party was formed in 1959 when twelve members of parliament (MPs) broke away from the former ruling party, the United Party, because of its refusal to repudiate the racial discrimination policies promoted by the Nationalist regime. Between 1961 and 1974, the Progressives held the sole non-Nationalist seat in the House of Assembly, with MP Helen Suzman constituting the only dissident voice in the entire parliament. In 1974 the party won seven seats, marking the beginning of a period of slow but steady growth. Between 1974 and 1977, the party increased its presence in parliament, especially when the United Party dissolved and its liberal elements joined the Progressives. That year (1977), the party renamed itself the Progressive Federal Party (PFP) and became the official opposition in parliament, advocating a federal system for a future nonracial South Africa. In 1989, the PFP amalgamated with two parties created by liberal Afrikaners, the Independent Party of Denis Worrall (the country’s ambassador to Britain) and the National Democratic Movement of Wynand Malan (an ex-NP MP and dissident Afrikaner), creating the Democratic Party. Worrall and Malan failed to bring over the large Afrikaner constituencies the party had thought they would, leaving the party with its basis primarily in English speakers.3 Throughout all these permutations, the party stood in opposition to the racial discrimination of the apartheid system (even as its members and followers benefited from it), and advocated individualism and classical liberal-democratic ideals. Three men headed the new Democratic Party: Malan, Worrall, and Zach de Beer, an English-speaking liberal who had been one of

T HE DA : MOBILIZING MINORIT Y POW ER?

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the original founders of the Progressive Party. During the 1989 House of Assembly elections, the newly formed DP took approximately 21 percent of the whites-only vote, mainly from Englishspeaking middle-class constituencies.4 In October 1990, de Beer became the sole leader of the party as it positioned itself to act as a negotiating bridge between parliamentary (the government) and extraparliamentary (the liberation movements) groups. In this role, the Democrats followed a strategy of “engagement politics,” which meant that in the effort to mediate between political groupings they would talk to any political organization, from conservative Afrikaners to the liberal Pan Africanist Congress (PAC).5 The DP had hoped that as the postapartheid political arena took form, it would be able to position itself as a centrist party holding the balance of power between the “far left” ANC and its allies on the one hand, and the “far-right” NP and its allies on the other. Unfortunately for the DP, it was not so easy to cast itself as this centrist force, and the positioning problem turned out to be much more fundamental than the party had anticipated. Many of the DP’s traditional values had been co-opted by a broadly liberal-democratic interim constitution that the ANC and the NP had hammered out during the Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA). This left the DP struggling to find a niche for itself in the new political landscape.6 Since the ANC and the NP seemed to agree on so many fundamental principles, the only arena left open for competition was the past. The DP therefore ran its 1994 campaign by attacking both the ANC and the NP on their histories, selling itself as the “true” adherent of liberal-democratic values. The DP claimed that neither the ANC nor the NP had a deep-seated commitment to either liberal democracy or market-oriented economics. It presented itself to the voters as the nucleus of a new, democratic center, “untainted by violence, corruption, apartheid and socialism.”7 It pushed its history as always standing for individual freedom, human dignity, and the rule of law, and offered the voter protection from abuse of power. The party promised, in a presage of the strident rhetoric adopted after 1997, to stand as an “effective opposition” to the future government. Party campaigners characterized the ANC as a mixture of moderates and radicals, divided over their policies and with no experience in political administration. The NP, DP campaigners maintained, had been ineffective in government and would be just as bad in opposition.8 The problem with this strategy was that most of the liberal English speakers who had traditionally supported the DP under a whitesonly government now worried that voting for the party would cause

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the ANC to gain a superdominant position in the postapartheid system. Conditioned by over forty years of a first-past-the-post electoral system, they reasoned that because the ANC was guaranteed to win the national election, a vote for the DP would be wasted. Of course, in the pure-PR system, this was not the case, but because the voters were used to a single-member ward, plurality system, many of the DP’s former supporters split their votes between the provincial and national ballots. They cast votes for larger parties like the NP on the national ballot, while voting for the DP on the provincial ballot, where ANC dominance was not a foregone conclusion.9 As South African academic R. W. Johnson explained, the DP “was the voice of liberalism in a conflict between two nationalisms which admitted of little middle ground. On the ground it was deserted by many of its left wing, who wanted to give one of their two votes ‘to Mandela,’ and by far more who bolted towards de Klerk, a safe haven in the storm.”10 Positioning in the Postapartheid Era The DP was stunned by its poor performance in the 1994 elections. Party strategists had expected to poll between 7 and 9 percent, but they secured only 1.7 percent of the national vote, winning just seven seats in the National Assembly. What little support the party did receive came primarily from white voters in metropolitan areas (80 to 90 percent of the party’s vote), particularly the suburbs around Johannesburg, Durban, and Cape Town. The party also failed to appeal to nonwhite voters, winning no more than 5 percent of the Coloured vote nationally and gaining an even smaller portion of the Indian vote.11 The defeat was so severe that, on the day the election results were finalized, party leader Zach de Beer resigned. The DP soon regrouped. Since it had been the opposition during the long years of Nationalist rule, the DP knew how to operate as a small opposition group in a parliament with a dominant ruling party. The difference now was that the dominant party was no longer oppressing the majority of the country, which meant that opposition rhetoric and strategies had to shift. The ruling party was now African, and had been the spearhead of one of the major liberation movements. Like the Nats, the DP had to deal with a positioning problem: as the party that had historically opposed apartheid and its groupbased ideology, it now found itself trying to establish itself as an opposition force in a government where most politicians and parties agreed on the goals that should be reached. The DP did not differ


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from the ANC on any of its principles or objectives. After all, the DP’s predecessors had fought for the same things: nonracial democracy and freedom from oppression. A second problem that immediately faced the DP was that of expanding its support base. In the 1994 elections, not only had the party failed to expand into the newly enfranchised nonwhite voters, but its share of the white vote had also sharply declined.12 The DP had expected that it would not receive much, if any, support from the newly liberated electorate, since this was the liberation election for millions of voters who were rejecting nearly fifty years of apartheid rule and oppression. Strategists assessed that for these voters, casting a ballot was not only new, but was also bound to be an extremely emotional experience, and so the party did not expend its resources by even attempting to tap into this base. The strategists were right: the party’s support among African, Coloured, and Indian voters was virtually nil.13 The party quickly assessed its strategy in light of these two challenges. First, it abandoned its three-tiered leadership structure and selected a sole leader, Tony Leon from Johannesburg. Leon represented a new breed of Democrat: Only thirty-seven years old, he had been a member of the Johannesburg City Council from 1984 to 1989, a member of parliament between 1989 and 1994, and had taken an active role during constitutional negotiations in the early 1990s. Some had felt that part of the party’s poor electoral performance had stemmed from de Beer’s weak leadership, and so Leon immediately steered the party in a more aggressive direction. As the first parliament convened in May 1994, Leon and six other representatives in the National Assembly assumed a presence in national politics far out of proportion to their physical numbers. The party had played a role as mediator between the two political giants, the ANC and the NP, during constitutional negotiations, and initially it followed the same route in parliament. Since each of the DP MPs sat on multiple committees, there was a Democratic presence on every single committee. Ken Andrew, one of the DP’s most senior leaders, served as the chairperson of the Joint Standing Committee on Public Accounts, a leading committee that serves as a check on the ruling party’s financial management of the country. The DP’s parliamentary strategy, designed to raise the party’s profile as an oppositional grouping, met with great success: its 7 members received proportionally far more media coverage than most of the ANC’s 220 members, and the profile of the DP’s 7 MPs was far higher than that of almost any of the ANC backbenchers.14 The DP

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picked its battles carefully, with an eye toward maximum exposure. Rather than making an issue of every government action, the party confronted the government on some issues and took a soft, persuasive approach to others. The DP thought that cooperating with the ANC on some issues while confronting it on others would convince the ruling party to take the DP seriously when it actually chose to oppose. The DP also thought that a “soft approach” to opposition would earn it the ear of the ANC, and so it used back channels and closed-door debates rather than strident public opposition to suggest changes to legislation and new policies.15 The soft approach made the DP relevant and influential, but did not generate the news coverage that would demonstrate to potential supporters how the DP could achieve results. In mid-1996, the party shifted tactics once again, this time moving away from the mediation approach to one of “aggressive” opposition, which the party called “muscular liberalism.” Party leader Leon announced that the Democratic Party would not only criticize the government, but would also present well-designed alternative policies to supplement its critiques of government performance and policy.16 The DP’s decision to reshape itself also entailed a decision not to contest the 1999 elections in an alliance with any other political parties.17 The new strategy proved effective. Both researchers and the press soon hailed the Democrats as the most effective opposition party in parliament, with its seven MPs far outshining the eighty-two representatives of the National Party. In a midterm performance assessment (September 1997), researchers at the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa) selected the DP as the most effective party in parliament, noting its use of question time, interpellations (minidebates), and the introduction of private members’ bills to advance issues important to the party (such as legislation on crime and justice).18 In the period between 1994 and 1998, the seven members of the DP tabled over half the number of questions as did their eighty Nationalist colleagues (1679 to 2739), and asked the second most number of questions of any party in the National Assembly.19 The party spearheaded debates in parliament on a variety of issues, ranging from the ANC’s role in the Shell House shootings (March 1994), to probing Winnie Mandela’s past actions, and on to the Sarafina II scandal in the Health Ministry. 20 It also took the lead in introducing legislation on crime and justice issues; in most cases, the party’s proposals were absorbed into policy documents and bills originating from the relevant department or ministry. These were moves calculated to build a reputation as an effective party, essential


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to positioning the party to scoop up the voters disaffected by the ANC and those unhappy with the other opposition parties. By mid1998, Mail and Guardian columnist Howard Barrell described the DP as the “real” leader of the opposition, saying that “seven DP MPs make their National Party counterparts look like 80 feather dusters.”21 Gaining Ground By switching away from its role as mediator and toward aggressive opposition, the DP began to expand its base fully into white South Africa, shedding its image as a party for just the English. In a series of municipal by-elections during 1997 and 1998, the DP won the support of Afrikaners in several key areas. This was the first sign that the party was moving away from its exclusive ethnic appeal. As an article in the South African magazine Leadership stated in mid-1997, Kempton Park, Witbank, Margate, Boksburg, Roodepoort. What do these five towns have in common? Simply this: that in consecutive municipal by-elections held in these towns in the seven months between March 12 and November 27, the Democratic Party has wrested a seat from the National Party—usually with a thumping majority- a voter swing that virtually reverses the two parties’ positions at the local government elections of 1995/96.22

The Boksburg by-election in October 1997 was particularly notable, for here the party that had traditionally represented liberal, Englishspeaking South Africans managed to win a seat that formerly had been held by the Conservative Party, a far-right Afrikaner party that had merged with others to become the Freedom Front in 1994. Three more municipal by-elections in May 1998 confirmed that the Democrats were continuing to challenge the National Party’s hold on whites in general and Afrikaners in particular, as the DP began to win by-elections in areas regarded by the NNP as safe seats: Rosettenville and Brakpan in Gauteng, near Johannesburg, and Bergvliet in the Western Cape. In the 1995 local elections, the DP had been able to poll only 7 percent of the vote in Brakpan, so this victory in particular represented a major shift in favor of the party.23 The Democratic Party further shed its reliance on English speakers when it began to make rapid gains in the Platteland, the Western Cape, and other former NNP strongholds throughout the rest of 1998 and early 1999. Poll predictions in early April 1999 anticipated

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that the NNP should expect to receive no more than one-quarter of the vote it had received in 1994, down from the half indicated by opinion polls before that point.24 The DP capitalized on these advances in opinion polls and wins in by-elections to mount an aggressive recruitment campaign in the defections season that preceded the 1999 elections. As with the byelections, the DP used the defections season to further move away from its identity as an ethnic party, particularly by wooing NNP leaders. Party strategists intentionally targeted influential NNP leaders, in part because this would bring Afrikaners into the party and at the same time would embarrass the NNP and help push it further along what the DP considered its terminal decline.25 There were indications that the DP kept the pace of defections slow through much of 1998 to save them up and create a “bandwagon effect” as the campaigns for the June 1999 elections got under way.26 As the June 1999 elections drew near, the DP increasingly sapped the NNP’s election machinery of its strength in the Western Cape, wooing away dozens of organizers and targeting youth leaders in rural areas.27 Through these targeted defections, the Democrats helped to create the impression that the Nationalists were rapidly disintegrating. At the same time as the DP gained defectors from the New NP, however, it also lost many members who considered the party to be lurching too far toward the right to attract these new constituents. In particular, the party lost many of its liberal members to the newly formed United Democratic Movement (UDM). From January to May 1998, the Democrats lost at least a dozen city councilors in Gauteng, and in the Eastern Cape, as many as forty had defected from the DP. The party also lost important party officials in core English-speaking areas, including the branch chair in Port Elizabeth and the branch chair, councilor, and a former DP mayor of East London.28 All these defectors joined the UDM, as did the party’s few nonwhite leaders: William Mnisi, the DP’s leader in the National Council of Provinces (NCOP) and Dr. Bukelwa Mbulawa. By the close of 1998, the results of opinion polls, by-elections, and defections all indicated that the party was successfully expanding its support base beyond its traditional core of urban, liberal, white, English speakers. The new recruits were predominantly rural Afrikaans-speaking whites. Party leader Leon attributed the attraction of the DP for these Afrikaners to the fact that Afrikaners feel desperately let down by their own leaders, by de Klerk and by Roelf Meyer and the rest. They noticed that the biggest document


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submitted by the NP at the constitutional negotiations was all about the rights and privileges of the leader of the opposition. That was the heart of the matter for the NP, looking after the old elite and letting its voters go hang. It’s just the same now . . . . This self-interested fascination with the gravy train has become extremely visible to Afrikaans voters. They are more willing to trust others as a result.29

Leon maintained that the new supporters would not lead the DP to change its principles, claiming that, instead, the new recruits would have to ascribe to the liberal-democratic values to which the DP had historically adhered. If these people were coming to the party, it was not because the party sought them out, but because they felt that the ideals of the DP were the best way to protect their interests. The party’s effort to woo Coloured and Indian supporters was not pronounced during this period, and this created an impression that the party was becoming a vehicle for white interests, rather than just English or multiracial. The bid to make the party multiracial (though minority-based) came during the campaign for the 1999 elections. Election Strategy in 1999: “Fight Back” against ANC Dominance Led by the “Fight Back” slogan, the 1999 campaign had two primary goals: to position the DP as the leader of the opposition and to prevent the ANC from obtaining enough power to change the constitution unilaterally.30 Since the DP had earned just 1.7 percent of the vote in 1994 and most of its power was based in Gauteng, the DP could have easily chosen to target that province in 1999 and seek to control its administration. Instead, the DP targeted specific communities in Gauteng, the Western Cape, and KwaZulu-Natal, that when aggregated across the country could greatly increase the representation of the party in the National Assembly. In most political systems, a party as small as the DP had been in 1994 would have chosen to build a regional power base before contending for national power. Instead, the DP set its sights on national-level power and influence, at times sacrificing control over regional government in favor of election strategies that maximized national-level returns and pursuing pockets of voters spread across the country. These strategic choices reflect the nationalizing imperative of the institutional structure: the party valued the overall national share of the vote—and attendant representation in the National Assembly—over controlling a specific province.

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Mobilization Strategy In its effort to build itself into a nationwide party, the DP had two choices: to seek to build its strength along the lines it had been growing since mid-1997, reaching further into the territory of the NNP, or to attempt to generate support among African voters. Once the DP decided that becoming the leader of the opposition would be its primary target for the 1999 election, it had to rapidly increase its support base to win a much larger number of seats than the seven it had won in 1994. With limited resources, the party could not target potential voters indiscriminately. Therefore, rather than seeking to mobilize a core of upper class, elite interests, which would have been in line with its neoliberal approach to governance and the economy, or generating support within the ANC’s core African constituency (a long-term but slow-growth strategy) the party aggressively targeted minority communities dissatisfied with ANC governance. The DP claimed that it planned to target the support base of the ANC after the 1999 election. The focus in the 1999 election, however, was on winning the opposition vote, as stated in the party’s guidelines for candidates: “What we have to do now is to set ourselves up to take votes away from the ANC in the 2004 election. There is no doubt that the best way to set ourselves up is to ensure that we become the official opposition after 1999 . . . . Thus, our electoral objective is clear: to become South Africa’s second biggest party in 1999.”31 The party was making clear choices with effects designed to maximize national-level returns through the easiest methods. Party organizers repeatedly stated that they were pursuing potential supporters whom the party could attract with a minimum of effort. This translated primarily into minority voters. In KwaZulu-Natal, for example, one interviewee revealed that the logic in targeting voters was to gain as much support as possible, “regardless of who the party has to attract.”32 In this province, the party sought to gain “quick votes” rather than to spread its message evenly. Therefore, it made appeals to those who could be convinced that the DP could best preserve their status: ex-Nationalists and Indians who felt that conditions had worsened under ANC rule. The DP wanted to go after the African vote, the organizer explained, but instead it was targeting “people who see the DP as the best way to preserve their status . . . the party regrets going after people with these concerns, but the party needs the votes.”33 Had the party not been as concerned with becoming the second largest player on the national scene, it might not have needed to attract the gatvol (literally, “fed up”) vote in this manner.


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If the electoral system required geographic concentration in vote distribution, and the provinces had sufficient power to offer the spoils of office, an obvious strategy would have been for the party to wage an all-out war to win control of the Gauteng and Western Cape provincial governments. It would not have bothered to campaign in provinces such as KwaZulu-Natal, where the party could not hope to win enough votes to influence provincial-level administrations. Once firmly in control of provincial administrations, a party could use the advantages of incumbency to attract more supporters, mounting a challenge to the ANC in 2004 from a regional power base. However, with the excessive nationalization of power in the South African political system, provinces did not provide patronage bases, and the PR system did not waste votes scattered over large geographic areas, and so the party made different choices. As with the NNP, where the DP focused on a provincial race, it did not aspire to win control over the administration. Instead, it focused more on the national-level gains that could result. In particular, it sought to woo important constituencies and to prevent the ANC from winning outright control. This distinction remains important for the way it influenced mobilization rhetoric and type of electoral support base the party constructed. For example, in 1999 DP leader Tony Leon admitted that, even though the DP considered it possible to win the Western Cape, the party would focus more resources where it was “already strong,” in Gauteng.34 Leon and the DP strategists did not think they could win outright control over the Gauteng administration, but focusing campaign resources on the province would bring more overall votes to the party, gaining more seats in the National Assembly. It is difficult to imagine more direct evidence that parties prioritized national-level returns over controlling provincial administrations. The reason why the DP chose to concentrate on a province that would be harder to win, rather than one that was already out of ANC control, reflected the national concentration of power. The Western Cape was already outside of ANC control, and was thought likely to stay that way; the DP therefore did not need to win the Western Cape provincial government to advance the national goal of preventing an ANC two-thirds majority. Focusing on Gauteng would both bring the DP more voters than could be found in the Western Cape, and possibly force the ANC into a coalition government, further reducing the number of provinces under the ANC’s absolute control. Public party pronouncements did not claim the party wanted to win control over Gauteng to create an efficient, DP-led provincial administration.

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Rather, the party appealed to voters in Gauteng to vote DP in to “keep the ANC out.” Even so, the fact that the party could not hope to win control over the Gauteng provincial administration on an appeal purely to minority voters (Africans constitute 56 percent of the provincial population, according to the 1996 census) reflected the overriding imperative to prevent the ANC from controlling the province rather than for the DP to genuinely form the provincial government. Had the goal been to win Gauteng or virtually any other province outright, the party would have had to make some appeal to African voters, but in 1999, the party was not yet pursuing this group. While party organizers recognized that in the long term, the party would have to seek out support in the African communities if it were to challenge the ANC’s hold on power at the national level, in the 1999 election the party needed to increase its support as rapidly as possible. Since the aim was to become the official opposition after the 1999 elections, the party had decided first to consolidate support among the Coloured and Indian groups in the 1999 election, and then go for black support in later elections. “This will serve as a position from which to take over government in the long term.”35 Campaign Rhetoric Once the DA set its goals on national-level representation and chose a mobilization strategy that would fulfill those goals, it then had to develop campaign rhetoric that could mobilize supporters from the minority groups without being outright racist or alienating the larger community of African voters in the long term. The fact that most of the party’s mobilization strategies focused on the minority communities has led many commentators to characterize the DP and DA’s campaign styles as racialized, even though these same authors note that the racial appeals were coded rather than outright.36As Davis summarized, In South Africa, “white” parties needed to avoid the racist tag because of the delegitimisation of apartheid at home and abroad. However, for electoral success, they also needed to mobilize a constituency that feared and resented what it interpreted as “reverse apartheid,” while ensuring that they did not totally alienate black voters they could possibly target in the future. This precarious balancing act required the use of messages that could be interpreted by conservative whites as invoking the swart gevaar, [black peril] but were not overtly racist.37


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So what did these supposedly racialized, yet not overtly racial messages include? In 1999, the campaign focused on the need to build a strong opposition, streamline the state and promote economic growth. The campaign decried the decline in the standard of living since 1994, especially regarding individual security, health standards, and education. While these issues had been part of the DP’s platforms in the past, many of them had not been highly prioritized. The party had formerly focused on respect for the rights of individuals and the fight against oppressive government, and so, placed against this backdrop, its appeals regarding declining standards in education and health care, the need for a strong opposition, and the discriminatory effects of affirmative action policies seemed especially virulent and designed to court the fears of minority voters. Ostensibly, these issues could be of concern to any South African, but in the context of the race-class overlap, these issues were more pressing among the “formerly advantaged”— whites, Indians, and Coloureds (in that order)—who were worried that their quality of life was declining under the ANC government. It is because of this last trend that such appeals are often interpreted, in the South African context, as racial. Whether or not the DA intentionally courted race, as some argue, it certainly did not attempt to mobilize ethnicity, and its “racial” campaign was actually multiracial, appealing to whites, Coloureds, and Indians. A multiethnic, minority-race-based strategy reflected the dual incentive structures of social demographics and centralized power, for it had the ability to secure significant shares of seats in the national legislature, where real decision making takes place. Election Strategy in 2004: “South Africa Deserves Better” In the campaign for the 2004 election, the DA once again campaigned against a two-thirds majority for the ANC and chose strategies that would help it to become the lead opposition party in all nine provinces and win outright control over the Western Cape provincial government. As in 1999, the party chose strategies geared toward maximizing national-level appeal rather than cementing regional or local power bases. These choices further turned the party away from making ethnic, regional, or other small-group appeals. Recognizing the limits of remaining even a minority-based party, this time around the party did make some limited attempts to reach out to black voters, though the bulk of the campaign focused on cementing its hold over the white, Coloured, and Indian vote. Provincial targets were again established

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with the overarching national balance of power in mind, mitigating against ethnic or even monoracial mobilization strategies. Mobilization Strategies The 2004 slogan, “South Africa Deserves Better,” attempted to moderate the pugnacious overtones of the 1999 “Fight Back” campaign and to portray the Democratic Alliance (the renamed DP after 2001) as an alternative governing force to the ANC, or at least a party that would keep the ANC honest. This campaign therefore focused on playing up the DA as the only party that could operate as an actual opposition force to the ANC, as well as pointing to ANC policy failures. In its attempt to position itself as the only alternative to the ANC, the DA attempted to force all other opposition parties under its wing. Acknowledging that the ANC could not be overthrown in this electoral period, however, the DA once again fought for second place, sought support from primarily minority communities, and focused on national returns over provincial and local concentrations. Mobilization strategies in 2004 continued roughly along the same lines as in 1999. Once again the DA sought to cement the loyalties of Afrikaners and Indians and expand its base more fully into the Coloured community, particularly in the Western Cape.38 As a thirdtier goal, the party also began a small move to gain African support in the townships around major cities. Thus, while most of its efforts were designed to mobilize minority communities, the DA was beginning to attempt to broaden its support profile. To support the longerterm expansion into African voters, the DA began to open up branches in ANC areas nationwide in advance of the 2004 campaign, and it put more funds into radio advertising and staged a few wellpublicized visits to townships.39 The goal was to make limited inroads into the African voter base in 2004, in advance of a more focused strategy in the 2009 elections. The DA also entered into a tactical alliance with the IFP called the “Coalition for Change,” which attempted to build a bridge between the primary non-ANC, African-based political party, and the minoritybased DA. The two parties shared a degree of economic conservatism that served as the ideological platform for the coalition and shared opposition to ANC dominance. The parties agreed not to campaign against each other and to work together in provincial coalition governments where possible, and argued that between the two of them, they represented all South Africans.40 This short-term agreement allowed the DA to claim it was targeting black voters without expending many


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resources on them. The DA also made a distinct attempt to include more black, Indian, and Coloured candidates in electable positions on the candidate lists. Unfortunately for the DA, it was unable to recruit many well-known African candidates, and so ultimately this strategy may not have worked effectively.41 The critical point, however, is that, after setting national-level returns as the primary electoral goal, the party pursued a multipronged strategy that eschewed mobilizing narrow ethnic or racial groups. Campaign Rhetoric The messages in 2004 campaign followed a rhetorical and tactical strategy similar to the 1999 campaign. The DA’s rhetoric in 2004 was once again aggressive, warning voters about the perils of a one-party state, and painting the DA as the only opposition force capable of challenging the ANC. According to the DA’s message, South Africa should be a two-party system in which the ANC faced off against the DA (and its coalition partner, the IFP, if necessary). The campaign chose the “South Africa Deserves Better” slogan precisely to avoid alienating potential recruits from the ANC’s base,42 though some have noted that even this catchphrase was polarizing.43 According to the DA, “A big country deserves a better government. A big country deserves a better alternative. A big country like South Africa deserves a better future.”44 Most of the DA’s campaign either focused on warning of the perils of continued ANC dominance and a third presidential term for Thabo Mbeki or on castigating the other opposition as ANC lackeys (the NNP) and irrelevant (all other parties).45 The DA’s coalition with the IFP played a major role in its campaign to position itself as the only alternative to the ANC, as the two parties together could pose unified front against the ANC. According to the DA’s messages, the elections were a competition between the ANC and the Coalition for Change, as other political parties were irrelevant and there was no space for “fringe” parties in South Africa.46 Such messages were directly oriented toward the NNP and the new parties such as the Independent Democrats, headed by former PAC heavyweight Patricia de Lille. As journalist Paddy Harper described it, With a massive, well-oiled propaganda machine—the party’s reaction team can get out a statement against the enemy within 15 minutes—the DA has turned gouging the eyes of one’s political opponent into a fine art. As the DA enters what it calls the “consolidation of the opposition”

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phase of its campaign, more political larynxes are going to be crushed and ears are going to be bitten off. And while it’s not pretty, like Italian football, it works. Like the Italians, the DA’s campaign is as much about stopping the other side from scoring as it is about getting goals yourself. Only one party—the Inkatha Freedom Party—is spared. Clearly, Leon and his propaganda machine have borrowed from the old Chinese philosophy of “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” and are not messing with Mangosuthu Buthelezi’s crew.47

Furthermore, because of the NNP’s vague election pact with the ANC, the DA was able to convincingly argue that a vote for the NNP equaled a vote for the ANC. This theme surfaced most strongly in the Western Cape and KwaZulu-Natal, allowing the DA to advertise in an Afrikaans newspaper that “Die NNP wil die mag in die Wes-Kaap aan ANC gee [The NNP wants to give power in the Western Cape to the ANC].” 48 The substantive issues that the DA prioritized included economic policy, HIV and AIDS, service delivery, and the crisis in Zimbabwe. The DA criticized the ANC extensively on these points in its manifesto and the overall campaign; it proposed to supply free retrovirals and suggested the creation of a ministry devoted to AIDS, promised to deal with the situation in Zimbabwe, and suggested ways to improve South Africa’s economy. To satisfy its core supporters, the DA proposed establishing export processing zones and tax incentives to attract foreign investment; to attract new supporters, it advocated establishing a basic income grant of R110/month. The DA also attacked “labor laws,” indicating that, in its effort to reach out to black voters, it was pushing more for the unemployed and those not protected by trade unions, that is, the poorest who needed the basic income grant and who were not affiliated with Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU). Among all the ANC’s supporters, these were the ones who had been left out of the government’s policies and were therefore most likely to be alienated from the party. In this way, a pro-business party could attract poor constituents, who also happened to be black, by promoting a core ideological principle—free labor rather than unionized labor. By the end of this campaign, the DA had successfully earned Coloured support, but still no significant numbers of African voters.49 But the fact that the party had attracted the support of English, Afrikaner, Indian, and Coloured voters attested to the fact that the party rejected explicitly ethnic appeals, embraced a form of multiracialism, and responded to the institutional incentives in ways similar


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to the other parties analyzed in this work. The DA also never was a racial party in the sense of representing just one racial group or producing racialized rhetoric. It did become a minority-based, multiracial organization, mobilizing a community that far exceeded the size of any single ethnic group. At the same time, however, the DA accomplished this form of mobilization without raising the salience of racial identities, because it could capitalize on the flexibility imparted by the confluence of race and class. Class-based rhetoric avoided reifying racial cleavages and crafted more flexible support coalitions, allowed the party to appeal to voters spread amongst the nine provinces and to build bases in the provinces where it thought it could prevent ANC control. Conclusion The DP entered postapartheid South Africa in 1994 as one of the smallest political organizations, with a base exclusively comprising English-speaking white liberals. Ten years later, the DP had transformed itself into the DA, constituting the largest opposition party nationally and in all nine provinces, at the head of a multiracial electoral coalition. The party’s transformation in these ten years was nothing short of remarkable, and it demonstrates many of the pressures facing opposition parties in South Africa. Operating in a system whose electoral rules could give rise to particularistic and small political parties, the party’s leaders consciously decided that the party could not rely on its traditional small base. Instead, they changed the party’s profile and sought to build a large support base to become effective at the crucial national level. The seminal period influencing these decisions fell between 1997 and 1999, when the then DP decided to transform itself into a party that represented a broader cross-section of South African society. By 1997, after observing the centralization of power and the emerging powerlessness of the provinces, party leaders decided to position the party to become a much more aggressive opposition that courted a wide variety of South Africans. In this process, the party moved away from its ideological position as the party of privilege, and attempted to appeal to a broad cross-section of South Africans across racial, class, and ethnic divides. While the party began to maneuver for this position well in advance of the 1999 election, it is in its choice of electoral strategies that the implications for the impact on ethnic mobilization become most clear. The party could not reach its electoral goals if it remained an

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ethnic party rooted in English-speaking white South Africans, nor would becoming a party of just white South Africa (English and Afrikaners) be sufficient. The party had to expand quickly, and therefore it chose to construct a multiracial, minority-based support coalition to reach its goals. Given the institutional focus on national power, the party’s choice to pursue the easily mobilizable minority vote made sense, and with the overlap of race and class, it was feasible that the party could make rapid gains with this tactic without having to resort to blatantly race-based appeals. In 2004, the party consolidated this new, multiracial, minority-based support base, and began to lay the foundations for an outreach to Africans in future elections. The party has not failed to appreciate that it would be condemned to permanent minority status if it continued to receive support almost exclusively from minority communities. Nor did the party seek voters from minority groups simply because “whites vote for whites and blacks vote for blacks,” as the most simplistic expression of the racial census theory would allow. The DA, to an even greater extent than the NNP, mobilized support according to a logic that made conscious decisions to target members of minority racial communities because they were easily mobilizable, shared material interests, and had the potential to deliver large electoral returns capable of guaranteeing national-level influence in a short amount of time. This strategy was feasible because, in the proportional representation system, what matters is the overall number of votes a party earns, rather than from where they come. Potential voters did not have to be concentrated in particular constituencies, and thus parties could seek to build support profiles that reflected commonalities not necessarily represented geographically, such as linguistic or racial ties. Whether or not these parties succeeded, it is critical that they moved away from courting ethnicity, for the result is that the South African party system, and hence South African politics, did not become enmeshed in politicized ethnic tensions that could have threatened the very foundations of the new democracy.

Chapter 8

The Inkatha Freedom Party: Turning away from Ethnic Power

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f all the major players in South African politics between 1994 and 2004, the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP) had been the most ethnically and regionally based, receiving over 90 percent of its support from one ethnic group, the Zulu, and locating virtually all its support within the confines of one province, KwaZulu-Natal (KZN). During the first decade of democracy, the IFP attempted to shed the party’s exclusive Zulu appeal and to build a national following based on social and economic conservatism. Whether or not the IFP succeeded (the party still derives most of its support from Zulus), the mere fact that party genuinely attempted to become a national, nonethnic organization is important and reflects the dynamics of the political system. In the case of the DA and NNP, decisions to move away from purely ethnic-based mobilization were motivated by calculations of electoral payoff: given the relatively small size of most ethnic groups, ethnic mobilization was not sufficient to guarantee a party genuine influence in the National Assembly. With the IFP a slightly more complex logic was at work, for courting the Zulu vote, if it delivered the entire constituency, could have provided more than 20 percent of the vote. The IFP found, however, that it could not command the loyalties of all Zulus and that provincially based power did not prove as valuable a resource as the party had anticipated. As a result the IFP tried to reach beyond both its ethnic and provincial roots to earn a national support base independent of the Zulus. By late 1998, the IFP had developed national aspirations that could be realized only by increasing its representation in the National Assembly. Facing challenges from the African National Congress (ANC) for the loyalties of Zulu voters in the 1995 local elections, the

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subsequent inroads that the ANC made into the IFP’s Zulu heartland in 1999, and the preexisting incentives for seeking national power, the IFP shifted its rhetoric and policies toward a nonethnic, broadly conservative platform, and chose to direct significant campaign resources to the national level rather than concentrating solely within KwaZulu-Natal. Given the electoral system the IFP could reach for support spread out across several provinces without needing to gain enough votes in any single area to win over a particular ward, and by doing so could stretch its campaign resources. While the party found that provincial governments did not have much policy autonomy, nonetheless controlling the government in KwaZulu-Natal enabled the party to reinforce support in its core rural Zulu areas with a minimum of effort. Unlike the NNP and DA, which rejected the cultivation of regional bases, the IFP felt that retaining its provincial power base was a crucial backup should the primary national strategy fail. The very presence and importance of this national strategy reflects the incentives of the nationalized institutions and social divides. The party could earn a certain base level of votes while prioritizing a more risky national strategy that did not rely on Zulus. The party therefore pursued distinct national and regional strategies: in the national tier the party positioned itself to shed the reputation as an ethnic party and to build a coalition of social and economic conservatives who liked “traditional” values, while attempting to retain the provincial stronghold as a fallback plan. Accordingly, the IFP managed its mobilization strategy with these two goals in mind. Party Preliminaries: Background of the IFP The current incarnation of the IFP traces its roots to 1928, when the Zulu King Solomon kaDinizulu created an organization, Inkatha kaZulu, to act as a rallying point from which the Zulu people could fight the Native Affairs Bill of 1920.1 This exclusively Zulu organization did not last very long, but while it was active, it worked in coordination with the ANC. Many of Inkatha kaZulu’s core leaders were also highly placed members of the ANC, including such eminent people as Pixley kaSeme, John Dube (the first ANC president), and Josia Gumede. After a long dormancy, Prince Mangosuthu Gatsha Buthelezi began to rebuild Inkatha during the 1960s, ostensibly as a Zulu cultural organization, but also with the purpose of supporting and advancing the goals of the ANC inside South Africa.2 In 1975, Buthelezi officially revived the organization in the form of a cultural

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liberation movement, Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement), while merging his incipient organization with two fledgling Durban-based organizations: the Natal Workshop for African Advancement (NWAA) and Ubhoko. The NWAA was an organization mainly of academics, attorneys, medical doctors, social workers, and Black Consciousness adherents, and counted Steve Biko, Barney Pityana, and Oscar Dhlomo among its members. Ubhoko was an informal discussion group and think tank that had formed under the leadership of Bishop Alphaeus Hamilton Zulu, created in response to the political vacuum that had followed the banning of black political movements in the early 1960s.3 Both organizations wanted to mobilize the black (African) community in KwaZulu, at the time a self-governing territory with its own homeland administration headed by Buthelezi. With the encouragement of the ANC in exile, the NWAA dissolved itself and joined with Ubhoko as the new Inkatha movement.4 By the time of its official launch in 1975, Inkatha embraced the principles of the Freedom Charter and explicitly pursued the liberation struggle. At the same time, Inkatha assumed power in the controversial homeland government, arguing that it did this to keep the Nationalist government from installing a more pliable puppet regime.5 The party intended to present an independent force to resist the plans of the apartheid government. Later on, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Inkatha’s relationship with the government—specifically, the question of whether or not the apartheid regime had provided Inkatha with arms and ammunition to destabilize the province and target ANC activists—brought the party’s struggle credentials into question. In 1979 contact between Inkatha and the exiled ANC broke down and relations between the two remained contentious through the 1980s. Within South Africa, the IFP competed with the United Democratic Front (UDF) to lead the internal struggle. Inkatha sought to challenge the apartheid administration from within, while the ANC/UDF thought violent resistance and a policy of absolute noncooperation with the apartheid government were the only ways to liberate South Africa. These differing strategies brought the organizations into conflict, as each accused the other of either complicity with the apartheid regime or dangerous and violent tactics that were killing innocents. Complicating matters, Inkatha was still based primarily within the KwaZulu homeland, and viewed any attempts by the UDF to organize there as a challenge to Inkatha’s power. Relations between the two organizations degenerated into a state of virtual civil war by the late 1980s, which continued into the early 1990s.

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Inkatha became a “modern” political party, the Inkatha Freedom Party, on July 14, 1990. Chief Buthelezi remained the head of the party, which maintained close links with the Zulu royal house. The party’s core followers resided in the rural areas of KwaZulu, where local chiefs played an integral part in rallying villagers behind it. Ideologically, the IFP sought to present itself to the National Party as potential negotiating partner, representing a black liberation movement that supported capitalism and free market economics as opposed to the ANC’s socialism and communism. The central concerns of the party revolved around federalism, devolution of power, and achieving official recognition and status for the Zulu monarchy. The IFP’s role in the events preceding the April 1994 elections could at best be described as controversial. First, the IFP threatened to destabilize the country and boycott the elections. The party was unhappy with the new weak form of federalism and was holding out for self-determination for the Zulu kingdom. It also demanded an international inquiry into the shooting of members of a Zulu march outside the ANC’s national headquarters in March 1994 (the “Shell House massacre”). Political violence in the KwaZulu homeland and the province of Natal reached such a peak that the IFP’s boycott threatened the entire transition process, and the ANC and the NP were forced to negotiate with the party. After international mediators were called in and meetings arranged between Buthelezi and Mandela, the IFP called off the boycott, just eight days before the elections.6 Had the IFP not conceded and participated in the elections, the Independent Electoral Commission may not have been able to find enough people to staff polling stations in KwaZulu-Natal, or places to set up the stations, since Buthelezi controlled many of the public buildings. As it was, with a week to establish election machinery and put the IFP onto the ballots, the situation was not easy. Continuing rivalries between the ANC and IFP prevented free electioneering in many areas of the province, especially in the “no-go” zones in urban and rural areas.7 Ultimately the election was able to proceed in the homeland of KwaZulu and province of Natal, and the actual threeday election period was relatively peaceful, given the problems that had plagued the province beforehand. The IFP performed fairly well in the ensuing elections, especially given that it only ran an official election campaign for one week.8 It polled enough votes nationwide to qualify for three cabinet positions and to become the third largest party in the country, winning 10.54 percent of the national vote and forty-three members in the National Assembly. The IFP earned more votes than the ANC on


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both the national and provincial ballots in the new KwaZulu-Natal province (the merged KwaZulu and Natal territories), winning 40.5 percent of the national ballot in the province, compared to the ANC’s 39.8 percent. The final result of the 1994 election ceded control over the provincial administration to the IFP by a margin of 50.3 percent to the ANC’s 32.2 percent. The party emerged from the elections with a predominantly rural base centered in KwaZulu-Natal, though it also had pockets of support spread throughout the country, most notably in the male-dominated hostel areas on the East Rand and in Gauteng.9 1994–1999: Repositioning in the New South Africa The Inkatha Freedom Party entered the postapartheid era seemingly in a position of strength, as the ruler of the KwaZulu-Natal provincial government and a member of the Government of National Unity (GNU). Between 1994 and 1999, four sets of issues shaped the IFP’s position in South African politics and influenced its choice of mobilization strategies for the 1999 elections. First, the party learned that it could not count on the automatic support of Zulus. Second, just as the party realized that its electoral base was dwindling, it also discovered that control over the provincial administration had not given the party as much power as it had anticipated. Third, the IFP found it difficult to separate itself from the government and establish an ideological identity independent of the ANC on the national scene. Finally, in a strategic debate similar to the one experienced within the NNP, the IFP experienced internal conflicts between hardliners who wished the party to return to its demands for self-determination and official status for the Zulu monarchy, and those advocating for a more conciliatory and cooperative relationship with the ANC. Uncertainties in the Zulu and Provincial Support Bases Soon after the 1994 election, Zulu King Goodwill Zwellithini ended his fifteen-year relationship with the IFP, claiming that the Zulu monarchy should take a neutral role in the political affairs of the province and not support any particular party. Zwellithini had been gradually distancing himself from Buthelezi and moving closer to the ANC ever since the April 1994 elections, and this move reflected personal rivalries between Buthelezi and Zwellithini, as well as the latter’s interest in preserving power independent of the Inkatha political party.10

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Given the fact that the IFP had historically centered its appeal on claims to represent the Zulu people and argued for regional autonomy to protect the Zulu kingdom, the break caused both strategic and practical problems for the IFP. First of all, given the party’s historical base, any break in Zulu solidarity could hurt the IFP to the benefit of the ANC. On the practical, mobilizing level, if the IFP could not claim to speak for the king, then it could not claim to be the natural political outlet for all Zulus. Thus, the IFP had to work harder to retain the support of both the amakhosi (chiefs) and villagers, since their loyalties could now divide between the king and Buthelezi. Strategically, if the IFP could no longer claim to be the political arm of the Zulu kingdom, then the party’s main policy issues in the national sphere (regional autonomy and devolution of power) would have to be grounded on a less ethnically based rationale. Luckily for the IFP, relations between Buthelezi and King Zwellithini thawed in early 1997, but by then, the IFP had realized the limits of relying on the king as its major claim to legitimacy and on the king and amakhosi to rally ethnic support. A secondary tactic, then, was to fall back on a regional power base centered in KwaZulu-Natal. This proved difficult, however, because the provincial power base soon came under threat. South Africa’s first postapartheid municipal elections were held in November 1995 in all provinces except KwaZulu-Natal and the Western Cape, where elections were postponed owing to the threat of electoral violence. In these elections the IFP was decimated in virtually all provinces: the party won 0.7 percent of vote in the Gauteng local elections, and a negligible number of votes elsewhere.11 When local elections were finally held in KwaZulu-Natal in June 1996, the IFP’s share of the vote was well below the 50 percent it had won in 1994: the party earned 44.5 percent of all the votes cast versus the ANC’s 33.2 percent. Almost all of the party’s support came from rural areas, with as much as 96 percent of the vote in some villages, while the ANC took most of the urban centers, including Durban, Pietermaritzburg, and most larger towns.12 IFP strategists admitted to being “disappointed” with the results, stating that “evidently, we will have to totally reconsider our strategy in urban areas.”13 While the party’s support was reduced to a rural base, even this was not secure: the ANC garnered 20 percent of the rural KZN votes (up from just 2 percent in 1994), indicating that even rural voters were not immune to switching their loyalties. The local elections of 1995 and 1996 demonstrated to the IFP that, in the “new” South Africa, the party could expect serious challenges to its power in the province,


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further reinforcing the emerging conception that national presence was the best way to retain political significance. These election results revealed that the political divisions in KwaZulu-Natal could not be attributed solely to ethnic divisions, but also to class and geography.14 The ANC not only managed to win control over the economic centers of the province, but it also took the majority of votes among the more progressive, educated, urban class which was influential in the economic life of the province. The IFP, in contrast, was most popular among conservative, rural, mostly uneducated people, and failed to attract those who would be the future elites in KwaZulu-Natal. Without their support, the party would find it difficult to attract leaders with strong credentials and intellectual caliber.15 In addition, as relations between the ANC and the IFP improved and the levels of political violence in the province declined, it became more feasible for the ANC and other parties to gain entrance into former no-go areas, both rural and urban. Notably, journalist Justice Malala commented that “political allegiances in the province [KZN] are fluid,”16 a significant development in areas of a province once thought impenetrable to any party other than the IFP. Inkatha had already lost the urban economic elites of the province, and now its rural support base was coming under threat. Disappointing Spoils of Provincial Power At the same time the party found that controlling the provincial government did not deliver as many benefits as it had anticipated. Even if the IFP had not experienced challenges to its provincial power base, it would have grown dissatisfied with holding political influence in just one province, because it learned that provincial governments did not have enough budgetary discretion to generate the patronage resources needed to keep supporters loyal. This realization left the party with one of two strategies: go local or go national. The party chose the latter. The IFP felt that a lack of genuine power in the provincial administration tied its hands when attempting to govern KwaZulu-Natal, and found that without controlling the cities and urban areas, the party had a very small budget to spend. Between 1994 and 1999, Buthelezi made it public knowledge that he considered the provincial government to be practically powerless in many substantive areas. He criticized the national government for excessively controlling provincial governments and claimed that the lack of real federal powers in KwaZulu-Natal had left the province in a hopeless situation. “Had we

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effective governing powers in this province, we would have revealed how wishy-washy, ambivalent and indecisive the national government has been thus far. They have tried to please everybody at the same time, in the end promising a lot amid doing very little.”17 At other times, Buthelezi and the IFP were more specific in their critique of provincial powers. The party especially railed against the inability to effectively control the provincial civil service and policing, areas that the IFP deemed especially important for running the province and delivering social benefits. Increasing provincial control over these two areas, according to Buthelezi, was “just the tip of the iceberg of what would need to be done to promote effective delivery of essential services such as housing, health, welfare and education.”18 The lack of appropriate powers made it impossible for provinces to structure and direct a provincial police service, while the lack of control over the civil service impaired service delivery. Finally, the patronage resources associated with controlling the KwaZulu-Natal government turned out to be less than anticipated as well. When the IFP lost most towns and cities in the 1996 local elections in KwaZulu-Natal, it also lost control over most of the provincial budget. Having won mostly rural councils, the IFP dispensed a total budget of just R78 million, compared to the ANC’s more than R6 billion for governing the province’s cities and towns.19 Thus, the ANC acquired control over many more patronage opportunities than did the IFP. The one benefit for the IFP in this regard was that winning control over rural councils gave the IFP increased leverage over traditional leaders, who headed most of the rural councils. Provincial control over the salaries of these positions should have provided the party with a concrete material resource with which to reinforce the ties between it and traditional leaders. Nonetheless, even this resource was counteracted by the national government. The central government paid traditional leaders official salaries separate from the compensation they received as heads of rural councils, providing the ANC with the power to offset the IFP’s leverage. Awarding last minute salary increases became an especially important and obvious ploy in the ANC’s efforts to woo traditional leaders in both KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape during the 1999 and 2004 elections, as was the party’s program to build “great palaces” for the kings of local tribes in KwaZulu-Natal and the Eastern Cape.20 In sum, as the IFP discovered that it could no longer automatically count on the loyalties of Zulus, and that the party’s national and provincial support bases were eroding, it also learned that controlling the


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provincial administration did not produce the payoffs it had anticipated. The combined effect of these realizations led the IFP to conclude that relying on a regional support base grounded in the loyalties of Zulus was unreliable and did not deliver many opportunities to build up the organization and govern effectively. Even the IFP, a party that openly embraced its regional background, found that the national concentration of political power made it imperative to maintain influence at that higher level. Ideological Positioning, Participation in the GNU and ANC-IFP Relations The final factors affecting the IFP’s attempt to position itself in a democratic South Africa dealt with the party’s direct role in the national political arena and its relationship with the ruling ANC. The IFP initially attempted to position itself as an ideologically distinct entity and alternative to the ruling ANC, while at the same time remaining a member of the Government of National Unity. The IFP soon discovered that serving as opposition while in government was even more difficult for a historically black organization than it had been for the Nationalist Party. Early on in the postapartheid period, the IFP had been able to position itself as the ideologically conservative, African alternative to the leftist ANC. This differentiation should have been simple—the IFP had long embraced free market principles and enjoyed the support of business interests, both domestically and from abroad, while the ANC was traditionally socialist. The IFP could also paint the ANC as a party captured by communists and “trade union barons.” As the ANC began to shift toward the right, it became difficult to distinguish its policies from those of the IFP. The ANC’s shift to the right thus created both ideological and practical problems for the IFP, a dilemma demonstrated by a prominent member who said, “we were the ones who were espousing privatisation while they were talking about nationalisation. Who is saying that today? They are talking about parastatals that must be privatised. The economic strategy of GEAR, most of those things are the ones we champion as a party.”21 Since retreat into exclusively ethnic appeals was not electorally attractive for a party desiring national influence and had been rendered uncertain by the strained relations with the king, and control of the province had been challenged and had proven nonlucrative, the party’s situation became even more vulnerable. The only two issues that the IFP consistently raised at the national level, federalism and constitutional recognition for the place of traditional

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leaders in government structures, did not help it to build a national profile as a nonethnic party raising issues relevant to the majority of South Africans. While the party had difficulty separating itself ideologically from the ANC, it also found that membership in the GNU constrained its ability to generate a profile as a critical opposition force. Other parties could harshly criticize government policies because they were not associated with their development. In contrast, IFP members felt that they could not openly criticize government policies once bills had been introduced into the National Assembly, or public positions taken by government ministers. According to IFP MP Ben Skosana, “as a member of the GNU you are associated with a particular bill of legislation. Those who are outside the GNU really have a free rein in terms of asking questions. This is a constraint of being in the GNU.”22 If the party could not offer an ideological alternative to the ANC, neither could it present itself as a critical opponent of the government because of its continued participation in the GNU. The IFP’s cooperation with the ANC periodically led to rumors that the two parties were on the verge of merging, making the task of maintaining an independent identity even more difficult. When both President Mandela and Deputy President Thabo Mbeki left the country in early 1996, Mandela appointed Buthelezi to serve as acting head of state in their absence. Many in South Africa considered this an indication that the ANC was attempting to draw the IFP closer, in a manner modeled on the incorporation of the Zimbabwe African Patriotic Front by the Zimbabwe African National Union in the 1980s.23 Calls for an ANC-IFP merger continued to curtail the IFP’s ability to build a national-level, independent profile throughout 1997 and 1998. The pressures to retain national-level influence kept the party from breaking off relations altogether and pulling out of the government. Senior party leaders were dissatisfied with their roles in government, and they began to publicly debate the party’s role in the GNU soon after the NP withdrew. The three IFP ministers had become dissatisfied with the fact that they had no real power in the executive, claiming, “beyond running departments we do not have any real influence.”24 Unlike the NNP, however, in June 1996, the party’s federal council voted to stay with the GNU. Party leaders wanted the organization to remain on the national stage and not be relegated to a purely regional phenomenon. The June 1996 local elections in KwaZuluNatal had coincided with a meeting of the federal council, and the emerging threat to the provincial base seemed to trigger this decision


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to focus on national-level influence. Before the elections, analysts had predicted that the IFP would pull out of the GNU and focus on building a strong provincial support base. After the local elections, party leaders decided that the party could not afford to withdraw from the GNU. Therefore, the three IFP members of the cabinet remained in their positions despite the problems that participation in the GNU generated for the party.25 The party’s thinking on the matter, as stated by IFP MP Walter Felgate, was that “there are political advantages to being in [national] government which we can use, and so we will stay there.”26 The IFP began losing it national relevance once the ANC chose to jettison the GNU after 1999. Buthelezi was not given another deputy president position (though the ANC could have done this); the party retained only one cabinet minister in 1999, and lost even that position in 2004. Nonetheless, the party still decided that it should try to attain national prominence, so in the 2004 elections, it spent just as many resources (financial and other) on the national campaign as the provincial.27 If the party had accepted a purely regional role, it would not have allocated resources in this fashion. Internal Divisions The final factor affecting the IFP’s attempt to position itself in postapartheid politics concerned a series of internal tensions regarding a longstanding struggle between moderates and hardliners. The party’s evolving relationship with the ANC, changes in the strength of the hardliner group, and the party’s performance in the KwaZulu-Natal local elections prompted a series of leadership changes at both the national and provincial levels. The 1995–1996 local elections had deeply shaken the party, and Buthelezi promised a complete restructuring. Accordingly, the party swapped provincial premiers in KwaZuluNatal three times between 1994 and 1999. After 1999, it retained a controversial and conservative individual, Lionel Mtshali, in the post; he lost the position only in 2004, when the ANC won control over the provincial government. Like the NNP, where similar leadership turnovers had been tied to conflicting views over where the party should seek its support in the future, the IFP also had issues concerning how best to reposition the party ahead of the 1999 elections. Should the party adopt a strong federalist stance and insist on recognition for the Zulu kingdom, or should it maintain its current strategy of conciliatory relations with the ANC and other political parties?28 Moderates favored a closer working relationship with the

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ANC and other political organizations, while hardliners thought the IFP should retreat to the strategy it had adopted before the 1994 election: noncooperation with the national government until its demands for devolution of power and the rights of traditional authorities had been addressed. Soon after the June 1996 local elections, the party deliberated about restructuring itself to reinforce the party’s provincial support base. To do this, it would need a more vigorous leadership at the provincial level. Over the next two months, the party moved several national-level leaders, such as constitutional negotiator Walter Felgate, Senator Narend Singh, and Cabinet Minister Ben Ngubane to the provincial level. Felgate in particular was a noted hardliner, who had pushed for a strong form of federalism during constitutional negotiations and had argued that the IFP should have not taken a conciliatory stance when dealing with other political parties in the KwaZulu-Natal legislature.29 By December 1996, public speeches by Buthelezi indicated that a major shakeup in the party’s national council would soon occur.30 Soon afterward, several senior moderate leaders resigned from the party, one of whom had publicly suggested the party democratize its internal workings; this generated speculation that the party was in serious crisis.31 The party replaced the provincial premier twice between 1997 and 1999, eventually installing Lionel Mtshali, a Buthelezi loyalist and an IFP hardliner as the provincial premier and installing the more moderate Ben Ngubane in a national cabinet position.32 The placement of Mtshali and Ngubane at provincial and national levels presaged the dual campaigns that the IFP would run in the 1999 and 2004 elections. At the provincial level, Mtshali returned to the hardliner rhetoric and demands that the IFP had issued in the months before the 1994 elections. At the national level, Ngubane’s cabinet posting represented a moderate commitment to pursuing a conciliatory relationship with the ANC and close cooperation in national government. The moderates had impressed upon the party the need to retain national presence, and so the party pursued a two-pronged strategy of equal emphasis on national and provincial concerns. The most conservative of the party’s leaders and those closest to Buthelezi were deployed to provincial rather than national legislative positions. Election Campaigns: National Ambitions versus Provincial Realities The party’s election campaigns exhibited this dual strategy. In both 1999 and 2004, the IFP sought to shore up its provincial support


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base with hardliner rhetoric, while also attempting to broaden its attractiveness on the national level with a more moderate approach. The party’s choices, both during the election campaigns and afterward, demonstrated the complex ways in which the institutional structures interacted with social demographics to shape party choices. The IFP had entered postapartheid South Africa as a party firmly entrenched in one region, advancing ethnic appeals and receiving almost all of its national representation from votes concentrated in KwaZulu-Natal. Yet party leaders often took offense at the suggestion that the IFP had no relevance outside the province. Reflecting the experiences of the party between 1994 and 1999, and in response to nationalized power, the IFP set four primary goals for the 1999 elections: to increase its national influence, diversify its support base, and shed the exclusive ethnic association, all while retaining a provincial support base and control over the KwaZulu-Natal government. In 1999 the party focused on winning support in KwaZulu-Natal, Gauteng, Mpumalanga, and the Eastern Cape.33 For a party with a very limited support base outside of KwaZulu-Natal, giving so much weight to the national as opposed to the KwaZulu-Natal provincial campaign demonstrated how the party had come to devalue provincial as compared to national power. This move surprised even seasoned analysts of the IFP. For example, Laurence Piper wrote: “[P]erhaps the most striking feature of the IFP’s campaign was not just that it had national and provincial components, but that the national component was so well developed.”34 Unfortunately for the IFP, this strategy failed to expand the party into a national political presence; the party earned substantial support only in KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, and was able to retain control over KwaZulu-Natal by an extremely narrow margin. Nationally, the party’s non-KwaZuluNatal votes came primarily from migrant Zulu workers in Gauteng and Mpumalanga.35 Despite this failure to build a national profile, the party once again pursued national presence in 2004. As in the previous national election, the party spent roughly half of its campaign resources outside KwaZulu-Natal, which Piper considered a “disproportionate emphasis” given the results in 1999. He also noted that half of Buthelezi’s campaign rally appearances had been outside of KZN.36 This was a risky decision for a party whose continuing national relevance depended on its ability to control one of the largest provinces in the country, making it more remarkable that the party once again put as much emphasis on national as provincial power.

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Mobilization Strategies The attempt to establish a national presence required experimentation with new mobilization strategies. Explicitly reflecting Buthelezi’s national ambition, the party focused its most vigorous efforts on winning new supporters, rather than shoring up its core supporters.37 In both 1999 and 2004, the IFP focused on voters from all racial groups, residing in both urban and rural areas; staged campaign events in all nine provinces; and spread messages devoid of ethnic content that focused instead on pluralism and social and economic conservatism. Ethnic rhetoric surfaced only in deep rural areas of KZN; elsewhere the party did not attempt to use Zulu identity to mobilize support. The party’s national election campaigns have attempted to mobilize the floating conservative vote: conservative whites, blacks, professionals, urbanites, Coloureds, and Indians. Within both KZN and nationally, the IFP targeted urban voters more than rural,38 which once again surprised analysts. According to Piper, not only did the 1999 campaign focus on the national tier, but it also seemed to neglect the party’s traditional rural base. [G]iven the dependence on KwaZulu-Natal for votes, one would have expected the bulk of IFP resources and effort to go into the provincial campaign, and especially the rural areas . . . However, while the IFP ran a provincial campaign of unprecedented organizational sophistication, activity in rural areas was disappointing.39

The party repeated this strategy in 2004, focusing as much or more on potential supporters in urban areas and the national scene rather than on consolidating the core rural base within KwaZulu-Natal. These choices reflected the nationalizing incentives of the institutional system. To reinforce the IFP’s attempt to convince voters that it had changed from a Zulu to a multiethnic and multiracial party, the party prepared campaign materials in all eleven national languages, including credit-card-sized election manifestos in four languages, held election launches in every province, and made sure that Buthelezi visited each province at least twice during the 1999 election campaign.40 In 2004, he visited each province at least once. In 1999, the IFP also established leadership structures in every province, though in some, such as the Western Cape, party organizations barely existed beyond those structures.41 One elections organizer reported that these national efforts were specifically designed to help overcome the Zuluidentification of the party.42


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Campaign Rhetoric In both elections, the party’s multilayered campaign targeted different groups with specific messages and methods. Rhetoric on the national tier was consistently nonracial and nonethnic in both elections. Ethnic themes surfaced in the provincial campaign within KwaZulu-Natal in 1999, but by 2004 the party avoided ethnic mobilization even within its rural constituencies. The party was explicitly trying to dispel the association of the IFP with traditional Zuluness, instead trying to shift focus onto the values of respect, family values, and discipline.43 The party therefore portrayed itself as the champion of fiscal, economic, and social conservatism; federalism and devolution of power; respect for tradition (not just traditional authorities); and morality. Its major policy platforms focused on government delivery through the devolution of power, job creation, controlling crime, education, and support for capitalism. In a marked turn away from the ethnic logic of federalism advanced in the campaigns for the 1995–1996 local elections, in 1999 and 2004 the party argued that devolving power would guarantee effective government and enable communities to determine their own fates. For example, Buthelezi told South Africans that what works for one province would not necessarily work for another. Provinces had become mere implementers of what had been decided nationally, and had no power to adjust solutions according to the needs of their people. By increasing the powers of the provinces, more effective management of resources could result in decent schools, better-equipped hospitals, and the efficient delivery of services.44 In 1999, these themes were categorized under the slogan, “the revolution of goodwill”; the IFP urged all South Africans to join in this revolution. In 2004, the “coalition for change” continued the portrayal of the IFP as an inclusive, conservative-liberal alternative to the ANC. The 2004 election manifesto, entitled “Real Development Now: Let Us Make a Difference Together,” focused on six big issues: HIV/AIDS, corruption, job creation and economic growth, poverty, crime, and foreign policy. Attempting to counteract prior criticism that the IFP was not a viable alternative to the ANC with its own genuine policy proposals, the manifesto was careful to outline concrete proposals describing how the IFP would address each of these issues if it were voted into government. The party used the debate over whether or not Mbeki would seek a third term to campaign on the larger issue of how the ANC had changed the constitution for political expediency in 2001–2002 (removing the antidefection clauses from the constitution).45

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Within KwaZulu-Natal, the two-tiered campaign strategies became more obvious. In contrast to the relatively nonethnic national campaigns, the provincial campaigns were more explicitly ethnic, though primarily this surfaced only when core constituents were addressed in the rural heartland of KwaZulu-Natal, and was less prominent in 2004 than in 1999. In these regions, the IFP’s 1999 campaign stressed its roots, identification with the Zulu monarchy, and ethnic identity. The KwaZulu-Natal campaign also emphasized at least two issues not seen on the national level: the need for unity and peace in KwaZulu-Natal and recognition for the Zulu monarchy. Buthelezi, who figured as the main campaigner in the province in both 1999 and 2004, told crowds that he hoped the next government would recognize the Zulu monarchy as a kingdom (primarily in the 1999 campaign). KwaZulu-Natal was unique among the provinces because it contained a kingdom. Traditional leaders needed to ensure that King Zwellithini would once again become the symbol of unity in the province.46 Overall, the 1999 campaign speeches in KwaZulu-Natal tended to reflect a mixture of national and more traditional, parochial concerns. By 2004, the party had attempted to jettison most of these ethnic appeals. It still advanced the interests of traditional leaders, just not those who were specifically Zulu. By the end of the campaign, however, when the party started to realize that its strategy of advancing rather than consolidating would cost too much, the party finally deployed Buthelezi to play the ethnic card. Significantly, Buthelezi courted traditional leaders as a group, rather than Zulu amakhosi in particular. In a speech aimed at snatching traditional leaders and the rural votes under their command away from the ANC, Buthelezi warned that five more years of ANC rule would be disastrous for traditional leaders. “Step by step, piece by piece, the power of traditional leadership is being eroded, and the same will continue for the next five years, unless at the next elections something is done to stop the ANC.”47 This was a definite play on ethnic sentiment, yes, but if this sounds like a speech that a Zulu political party would make to a Zulu audience, the reader would be fooled: Buthelezi made the speech while on tour in the Eastern Cape, addressing Xhosa amakhosi. This demonstrated that even though the IFP was raising an ethnic theme, the party still tried to raise it in a way that would appeal to all people with traditionalist values, rather than just to Zulus. Zulus were a subset of a larger group of traditionalists, and the appeals were couched to stretch to include the smaller and larger groups. The influence of nationalized incentives thus surfaced even within an ethnic appeal. The fact that the party had tried to campaign without the


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ethnic trump card, even among its core rural, Zulu support base, speaks to the extent to which ethnic mobilization had been rendered less relevant in the postapartheid era. Conclusion That the IFP could not reinvent itself in the course of a single election campaign would not surprise most observers, since parties rarely succeed in changing their identities and support bases over the course of one election period. The meteoric rise of the DP and the sharp decline of the NNP were the anomalies in the 1999 election, rather than the stability of the IFP and the ANC. The IFP faced positioning problems soon after the transition in 1994, and by 2004 the party still found it difficult to reposition itself. The party turned away from exclusive ethnic mobilization in 1999 and stuck to this course even after it failed to bring the desired results. In 2004, the continued emphasis on national representation and power cost the IFP control of the KwaZulu-Natal provincial legislature. The gamble did not pay off and had cost the party dearly. Why, then, did the IFP persist in its attempt to become a nonethnic, national party? Shouldn’t it have read the signs from 1999 and reverted to a defensive strategy for the 2004 elections that recouped lost Zulu, rural, and provincial support? One might argue that the party had not laid the groundwork for the change in tactics in time for them to be effective in 1999, and that this was why it thought the strategy would be more effective in 2004. This makes some sense, and helps to explain the strategy of having dual provincial and national electoral goals. Party strategists knew that the IFP could win enough votes to secure national-level representation solely from its support base in KwaZulu-Natal, even though it was under threat from other parties, but they could not guarantee the strength of this vote. Therefore, the dual campaign, focusing both on provincial and national levels, was the most risk-averse strategy the party could adopt. The PR system made the gamble far less risky than it might seem otherwise, since the party could gain national representation based on votes spread throughout the country, and therefore it did not matter where its votes concentrated. In fact, under the PR system, the party did manage to secure portions of the Zulu vote in both Gauteng and Mpumalanga, thus remaining a firmly regionally based party and the third largest party in the National Assembly. But two campaigns based on this strategy backfired and failed to keep the party strong on either the national or provincial levels.

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The IFP has tended to fall back on provincial power only in the wake of these failed electoral bids. The national objective is the primary goal, but the provincial power base is the fallback. As governments were forming after the 1999 elections, the IFP refused to give up control over the provincial government in KwaZulu-Natal, even though the ANC offered Buthelezi a deputy president position if the IFP would allow an ANC premier. If the IFP insisted on nominating the premier, Buthelezi would remain the minister for home affairs, a position he had assumed in the previous government. Rather then taking this chance to elevate Buthelezi in the national government, the IFP chose to retain control over the provincial premier post and keep Buthelezi as a cabinet minister. This enabled Buthelezi to retain power over important policies regarding immigration, identity documents, and a variety of other areas, while placing the party at the head of a coalition government in KwaZulu-Natal. At first glance, the IFP’s decision to turn down the deputy presidency in favor of nominating the provincial premier might seem to contradict the argument about the nationalization of power and the way that parties ordered their election goals and mobilization strategies to secure greater influence at the national level, often at the expense of provincial power bases. Yet the reasoning that lay behind the IFP’s decision in 1999 had less to do with controlling lucrative patronage opportunities in KwaZulu-Natal than it did with maintaining control over at least one national government ministry and the party’s concern about the symbolic message that would be sent to the electorate should the IFP cease to control the Zulu heartland in South Africa. The party had not completely abandoned all trappings of the ethnic bond. Patronage opportunities and the power associated with provincial governments did play some role in the decision, yet the particular considerations for the IFP in KwaZulu-Natal differed from the mechanisms at work in other provinces and with other parties. The NNP and DP both had viewed control over particular provinces as a method to challenge the ANC’s dominance at the national level, particularly within the NCOP, by changing the balance of power. Denying the ANC the symbolic victory of dominating all provincial administrations was another important goal for both the NNP and the DP. With the IFP, the goal of retaining control over KwaZulu-Natal was equally symbolic. First of all, for a party that spent almost half of the period between 1994 and 1999 advocating increased powers for provinces and the maximum devolution of power, it would have seemed an absolute about-face to then give up on its chance to retain


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control of provincial government, no matter how slim the powers of that province. Given the IFP’s origins as a Zulu cultural organization and its support for increased devolution of power as a way to empower communities, the party could hardly be expected to consider the loss of the premiership in KwaZulu-Natal as anything less than a denial of its historical role both in the province and its role as the political protector of the Zulu kingdom. Second, the IFP also needed to keep KwaZulu-Natal under its control out of the genuine possibility that, if it did not retain a provincial base, it would be completely swallowed by the ANC after the elections.48 By 1999, aside from the disagreement over power centralization, little separated the IFP and the ANC ideologically except for a few small policy issues regarding implementation, the death penalty, and the ANC’s liberal stance on several social issues. The distinguishing features for the IFP were its history as the party of Zulus, its advocacy of strong federalism, and the fact that the IFP controlled the KwaZulu-Natal government. When the party decided to downplay its pro-Zulu rhetoric in its effort to build a national profile, it could rely less on the Zulu identity to justify its continued independence from the ANC, which made control over a regional power base even more important. The result, as Piper phrased it, is that the party, by its own strategic choices, has mired itself in a “postapartheid strategic malaise”: Consequently, the IFP’s postapartheid politics has not so much transformed from militant Zulu nationalism to an inclusive conservative-liberalism as it has become trapped between them. What this means is that the party continues to rely on rural Zulu people for support, but is less and less able to use traditional leaders and old tactics of coercion combined with appeals to Zuluness. At the same time its efforts to reach out to new constituencies have not worked because the party has not developed the required leaders, policies, or record in government.49

The party did not intend to enter this quagmire, but found its way into this mess as the cumulative effect of its failed attempts to reposition itself. The very fact that the party attempted such a radical repositioning is the crucial element, however. The IFP responded to the interacting institutional incentives in a manner similar to that of other parties, by seeking to generate significant support on the national level, rather than simply relying on the support of Zulus in KwaZuluNatal. This choice of strategy demanded that the party turn away from ethnic mobilization and seek national representation on an

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unprecedented scale. The party chose to attempt this feat by appealing to conservative voters across the country and dropping most of is pro-Zulu rhetoric. In the end, the party did have some success among Afrikaners, but overall, its bid for national-level influence was largely unsuccessful. Only after this tactic failed did the party reprioritize provincial politics, at least in the immediate postelection period in 1999. In 2004, when asked whether Buthelezi should focus on the premiership rather than on retaining control of the Home Affairs Ministry, National Whip Koos van der Merwe answered that Buthelezi was “a leader of national and international standing, a president in waiting.”50 This, clearly, demonstrated the disdain with which the party, or at least its leader (who some argue is the party), regarded provincial power.

Chapter 9

Conclusion: The Contingent Nature of Political Mobilization

T

his volume was motivated by two simple questions: why and how has South Africa avoided the divisive ethnic mobilization that has caused democratic transitions in other countries to descend into violence? The answer offered in these pages proposed that sustained ethnic mobilization occurs only when political actors choose to activate ethnic differences as part of a sustained political strategy. Without the sustained activation of ethnic cleavages in the political sphere, ethnicity is more likely to remain politically latent, thus preventing locallevel tensions from accelerating into national-level political cleavages capable of breeding conflict and large-scale violence. Institutions commonly thought to reward ethnic mobilization, such as permissive electoral systems, may be counteracted by other structural factors, such as the locus of power and the structure of social cleavages. As new rules are being learned in this transitional period, fundamental polices are being debated and realigned, and political actors have to adapt the strategies by which they obtain and wield power. Many have argued that these imperatives create incentives for ethnic mobilization and by extension ethnic violence, but this volume has argued that the dynamic fundamentally depends on the structures of power in the new political system. In South Africa’s party-centric system, the relevant political actors are political parties, and during the political transition after 1994, these organizations were faced with the necessity to compete in an expanded electorate where national power was most important and courting ethnic groups too small to serve as electorally rewarding strategies in the national tier, and therefore virtually all political parties turned away from ethnic, and even single-racial group mobilization.

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The standard accounts for ethnic latency in South Africa explain it as a by-product of a political culture that devalues ethnicity, but this explanation contradicts the very real concern expressed before the transition about the specter of ethnic conflict. Ethnic group membership is a source of personal and social identity for many South Africans, even though it is not a line of political division. This volume proposes that the political latency of ethnicity can be directly tied to a structure of institutional and social incentives that jointly encouraged parties to develop nonethnic strategies of mobilization. The work challenges the now-conventional wisdom that ethnic violence almost invariably accompanies democratization and periods of political opening. Experiences in the former Yugoslavia, Iraq, Indonesia, and Afghanistan seem to reinforce this notion. For those who witnessed the intensity of the apartheid struggle and the sharp increase in political violence in 1993 and early 1994, a similar descent into civil war was not unforeseeable. And yet South Africa was able to prevent the emergence of political divisions along ethnic lines. Unlike the countries listed above, South Africa has not experienced ethnic cleansing and territorial dissolution, sectarian conflict, secessionism, and warlordism. In this book I have argued that large-scale, organized, and sustained ethnic violence requires political entrepreneurs to elevate ethnic consciousness, politicize identities, and then mobilize people into violence. Sustained politicization of ethnic identities will not occur unless political actors and parties mobilize ethnic groups, and they will mobilize these groups only when they believe them to be electorally rewarding. If there are no incentives for political elites to play the ethnic card, the likelihood of ethnic mobilization, and thereby ethnic violence, is greatly reduced. Without examining the supply of ethnic mobilization, therefore, the full causal process linking democratization and ethnic violence remains incomplete. South Africa’s political institutions, not designed specifically to prevent ethnic mobilization, ironically did just that. The country’s electoral system was widely expected to facilitate party fragmentation and encourage ethnic entrepreneurship. By nationalizing political power and decision making in the central government, however, the political system forced the most intense political competition onto the national tier, where ethnic groups were too small to constitute rewarding bases for electoral mobilization. The proportional representation electoral system has enabled small parties to secure seats in parliament, but the concentration of power in the central government encourages parties to eschew narrow ethnic divisions and rely on multiethnic and multiracial coalitions for electoral mobilization.

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Without this mobilization, the likelihood that ethnicity would become politically salient and the tensions between ethnic groups charged drastically declined. Ethnicity has remained active in social relations, but quiescent politically. Thus in South Africa, the interaction of different political institutions and social demographics conditioned party strategies to downplay ethnic mobilization, and encouraged parties to construct different types of electoral coalitions. These findings were generated by comparative case studies of the four major parties in South African politics during the country’s first democratic decade—the African National Congress, the New National Party, the Democratic Alliance, and the Inkatha Freedom Party. Each of these organizations entered the transitional period from a different position in South African politics—liberation movement, ruling party, main opposition party, and homeland government/liberation organization, respectively. Each one began the period with a different mobilizational base, and of these, only the ANC retained the same strategy of mobilization throughout the entire period. The remaining parties all shifted from patterns of ethnic mobilization into a diverse range of strategies, experiencing wildly divergent success rates. Their choices were structured by the incentive matrix created by the combination of nationalized power, a permissive electoral system, and a moderately fragmented society in which no ethnic group constituted more than 22 percent of the national electorate. The resulting institutional framework led each of the party leaderships to calculate that the amount of electoral support that its traditional base could deliver—English, Afrikaner, and Zulu—was not large enough to keep the organization an important player in the national political arena. Therefore, between 1994 and 2004, each party attempted to realign its support base by changing its mobilization tactics. In these endeavors, the parties took advantage of the fact that since they could win seats without geographically delimited support bases, they could mobilize large support blocs that were spread out around the country, rather than in small, geographically concentrated ethnic groupings. The DA successfully shifted its support profile from that of a small party that courted and represented just the liberal, English-speaking white community to an organization that used nonracial rhetoric to mobilize a diverse set of minority constituencies. By the end of the decade, the DA had begun to reach out to black voters as well. The DA has been successful enough in these efforts that it is now the second largest political party in the country. The party did not fail to appreciate that it would be condemned to permanent minority status if it

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continued to receive support almost exclusively from minority communities; nor did it seek voters from minority groups simply because “whites vote for whites and blacks vote for blacks,” as the most simplistic expression of the racial census theory would allow. Rather, the DA examined the institutional system in which it operated, analyzed how this refracted through the social demographics of the country, and set election goals accordingly. In a system where almost all power focuses on the national level, naturally a political party such as the DA, aiming to become a major national player, would try to gain representation in the most influential sphere of government. In contrast to the DA’s successful repositioning, the NNP attempted to craft a similar support base by shifting its mobilization from the white Afrikaner community to a multiracial, yet minoritycentered support base. Unfortunately for the NNP, it was not able to reinvent itself the way that the Democrats had. The NNP constantly shifted tactics from one election to another, mixing scare tactics with a vague Christian-Democratic political profile. Once the NNP turned away from being the political representative of the Afrikaner people, however, it could not find a niche for itself. Its ideology and policies were not distinct from other parties and it did not appeal to a strictly delineated set of identity or interest groups. The party’s tendency to form coalitions with odd bedfellows left it without an identity, without a solid set of policies, and unable to present a strong opposition voice to the government. Rather than reach out to African voters directly, the party attempted to use short-term, tactical electoral coalitions with other political parties that were meant to serve as intermediaries to mobilize Africans. Because the party valued national representation so highly, it refused to learn from the 1999 elections and adopt a regional strategy, even though it had been reduced to a primarily regionally based organization, based on electoral support. The NNP could have reframed itself as a party that was strong in the Western Cape and Gauteng, and it did attempt to represent those two provinces in a strong regional organization; however, it used up scarce resources attempting to retain the façade of being a national party, with national relevance and a national support base. If it had adapted to a regional organization, it perhaps would still be around. By alienating its core ethnic base, failing to attract a new group of supporters, and refusing to become a regional party, the NNP lost so much support by the end of the decade that it decided to disband. Finally, the IFP also entered into the postapartheid era as an ethnic organization, mobilizing Zulus primarily in KwaZulu-Natal province, and over the course of the next ten years, the party also shifted

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its rhetoric and mobilization strategy to de-emphasize ethnic mobilization and instead seek out a nationwide group of conservative supporters. The IFP responded to the interacting incentives in a manner similar to that of other parties, by seeking to generate significant support on the national level, rather than simply relying on the support of Zulus in KwaZulu-Natal. The party appealed to conservative voters across the country and dropped most of its pro-Zulu rhetoric. In the end, the party did have some success among Afrikaners, but overall, its bid for national-level influence was largely unsuccessful: the party’s electoral support has remained relatively stable since 1994. At the same time it must be noted that while the IFP has failed to grow its support base in the new regime, it has not seen its support decrease, as was the case with the NNP. Unlike the other parties, the IFP chose a dual strategy, combining nonethnic with small-scale ethnic mobilization and embracing regional organization to some degree. It positioned itself and put effort into advancing nonethnic themes on the national tier, while at the same time retaining ethnic strategies in local campaigns within rural KwaZulu-Natal This dual campaign was a balancing act: the first priority was to build a non-Zulu base with national relevance, but if that failed, the party was prepared to fall back on the old Zulu core. Given that the Zulus are the largest ethnic group in the entire country, the strategy makes sense, but was risky: soon after 1994 the IFP discovered that it could not command the loyalties of all Zulus, even within the deep rural areas of the old KwaZulu homeland. To diffuse risk, the organization decided to pursue a nonethnic base as well, putting over half of its election campaign efforts into the nonethnic components national operation and trying to grow the base beyond the ethnic core. The IFP has also made small sacrifices on the national tier to retain control over the provincial government in KwaZulu-Natal. It has done this only when forced to choose between the two, and even here the record is varied. Unlike the NNP, the IFP recognized the value of retaining a regional base to help the party distinguish itself from the ANC, and so again unlike the NNP, the party has been able to retain independence. Importantly, however, the regional backup was a strategy of last resort for the IFP, used in 1999 and 2004 only after the party had failed to successfully build a national profile. The case of the IFP points to some of the limits on the ability of any of these political organizations to reinvent themselves. Most voters refused to reclassify how they perceived the IFP, despite its conscious attempt to drop ethnic rhetoric and mobilization strategies.

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Most South African and international analysts still call this a “Zulu party,” even though the IFP has not used Zulu campaign themes in the last two national elections and the issues it champions in parliament are nonethnic. But the party’s base nonetheless remains centered in the Zulu population, as does public opinion about it. Therefore, even if a party responds to the institutional incentives and attempts to shift away from ethnic mobilization, perceptions on the ground may not reflect the repositioning efforts. Ultimately, the success or failure of these strategies has as much to do with voters and why they vote the way that they do, as it does with party strategies. For the purposes of this book, however, what is important is the fact that each one of these parties turned away from ethnic mobilization. Each party adapted differently and with different success rates, but all ultimately rejected ethnic appeals, and the choice to change strategies is the critical dynamic on which this volume has focused. The Future of South African Party Politics What does this mean for the future of party politics in South Africa? The party system has grown into a stable pattern of competition between one dominant ruling party and a smattering of small opposition groups. Some have argued that this dominance has provided policy continuity and prevented divisively competitive elections from destabilizing the country.1 Yet party dominance has its detractions, and the current institutional system does not offer an easy opportunity for small parties to grow large enough to unseat the ruling party. No opposition movement has come close to challenging the ruling party in the electoral arena, and new parties have found it extremely difficult to grow. Were the ANC as internally democratic as the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) of Japan while it was in power or as regionally diversified as the Indian National Congress (INC) during its heyday, party dominance in South Africa would not be worrisome. Yet the ANC’s tendencies toward intolerance of public criticism and centralization of power are troubling for the prospects of democratic accountability, responsiveness, and transparency.2 When one party controls so much of the National Assembly, the most important debates take place within the caucus of the ruling party. If the ruling party then exhibits signs of intolerance of dissent and centralization of power by muffling vibrant debate, this becomes problematic for the continued deepening of democratic practice. South Africa also has shown a poor ability to hold the executive accountable, and there is extremely little legislative oversight of the executive.3

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The absence of ethnic politics is beneficial, but the absence of vibrant party politics is not. The structures that have worked against ethnic mobilization are the same ones that have created an ossified party system. New parties have found it extremely difficult to gain entrance and carve a niche for themselves in national politics. This is due in part to the dominance of the ANC, but it is equally due to the fact that parties cannot build regional bases first, and then launch national campaigns once a solid foundation has been established. If they try to do this, most South Africans turn away from the party, because they know that a regional party will have very little influence in the country’s policy debates and official patronage system. The United Democratic Movement found this out within two years of its creation, when its poor performance in the 1999 elections led to charges of it being an irrelevant party with only a regional base. Some even called it a Bantustan party, because of its support that centered in former Transkei region of the Eastern Cape. Delegitimized in this way, the party has never been able to make up ground and become a truly energizing force. All other parties created since 1994 have faced the same fate. Since 1994, therefore, political commentators have predicted that a genuine partisan realignment in South Africa would only come at the expense of the ANC. Most have never seriously considered the opposition parties as genuine alternatives to the ruling party. Once the Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) had been replaced with the Growth, Employment and Redistribution (GEAR) framework, it was expected that COSATU would break out of the Tripartite Alliance and launch a rival party, much as the Zimbabwe Congress of Trade Unions had done in 1999 when its members created the Movement for Democratic Change. But this never came to pass. Between 2005 and September 2008, rising internal tensions within the ANC finally raised the possibility that the ANC monolith might crack. Divisions between camps loyal to the populist Jacob Zuma and the more reserved Thabo Mbeki, culminating in the forced resignation of Mbeki from the presidency, raised expectations that this breakup would happen soon.4 After these events, disaffected elites of the party called for reform of the “antidemocratic” procedures that allowed the ANC to recall its leaders.5 These same party elites had not objected when they had controlled the party’s highest administrative organ and issued their own recalls of provincial premiers, members of parliament, and other ANC officials. After Mbeki’s “recall,” resignation and subsequent replacement by Kgalema Motlanthe as interim president, the cracks developed into

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cleavages. Several influential ANC leaders, mostly from the Mbeki camp and led by Mbhazima Shilowa and Mosiuoa “Terror” Lekota, soon left the party and by November had formed a new political organization, given the name Congress of the People (COPE), which was officially launched in December. The leaders of the new movement all have the proper struggle credentials, many have trade union backgrounds and experience in government, and almost all the core leaders were part of the camp pushed out of power at the ANC’s national conference in Polokwane the previous December. While the future of COPE is unknown, it is critically important that the division is not ethnic. COPE does not resemble the Congress of Democrats (CoD) in Namibia, which has an ethnically defined support base. The CoD was created in 1999 when senior leaders of the ruling South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO) broke away from the party. The CoD’s membership is ethnically defined, though it advances nonethnic issues. Those who have created COPE are politically motivated and hail from a wide variety of ethnic groups, and so the resultant political formation is not ethnically based. Nor is COPE likely to court ethnic factions, as the various breakaway parties have done in Kenya since its return to multiparty politics in 1992. The split in the ANC is ideological and personal, and it feeds on grassroots anger at the elitist orientation and economic conservatism of Mbeki and his allies.6 The “Zuma faction’ is led by trade unionists, members of the SACP (South African Communist Party), and political elites who had been pushed out of politics for various reasons. These elites were able to capitalize on the popular disaffection by South Africa’s economic growth without job creation, but with rising crime and an inability to effectively respond to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. At the party’s 52nd National Conference in December 2007 (the Polokwane Conference), the sharp divisions within the ranks of the ANC and the disaffection of the grassroots members became more organized and public than at any point since 1994.7 Convention delegates elected Zuma as the president of the party and the “Zuma faction” won most of the seats in the National Executive Committee (NEC), the party’s highest policymaking body. These new NEC members included several disgraced politicians, such as Tony Yengeni and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, who had been forced to leave parliament; provincial premiers who had been recalled for mismanagement of their provinces, like Ngoako Ramathlodi (Limpopo); provincial populists like Ace Magashule (Free State) who had a tendency toward corruption and conspiracy theories; and several others who had been pushed out of government because they

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were potential rivals of Mbeki, like Cyril Ramaphosa and Tokyo Sexwale. Like those who formed COPE, the group that ascended at Polokwane was not ethnically uniform. What they had in common was an adverse reaction to the economic and fiscal conservatism of the Mbeki administration. Many have roots in the SACP or COSATU, and the alliance partners have been looking to the new leadership in the ANC to start repairing the damaged relationship among the three organizations. The split in the ANC calls to mind the creation of the UDM ten years earlier, when influential politicians from the ANC and the NP had formed a political organization that also criticized their parties for being stuck in the past and/or internally corrupt, but which was never able to gain a foothold in the South African political landscape. For a breakaway faction to create an effective party, it would have to be an extremely large “faction” to become nationally relevant. The fact that most South African analysts look to the breakup of the ANC as the only source of party system change also demonstrates how difficult it is for partisan divides to realign once the institutional fluidity of the early transition has settled into “normal” politics. The existing opposition parties contributed to the near-hegemonic position of the ANC in the first fifteen years by failing to effectively challenge the ANC and take away any of its support, and this largely owes to the strategies adopted by the opposition, which made sense at the time, but which have prevented the parties from challenging the ANC’s dominance. Does the split in the ANC mean that ethnic politics might finally surface in South Africa? After all, without the immense numerical dominance of the ANC, smaller parties could have more relevance in the National Assembly. But it is still unlikely that politics would turn ethnic. The incentives that pushed the existing opposition parties away from mobilizing their large groups—all whites, all Zulus, and so on, would maintain the same pressures on the new partisan alignments that could develop should the ANC splinter. Parties still would need to be important national players, for power still resides in the national arena. Even if one party could win all the votes from the individuals in any of these communities, that would still deliver the party 22 percent of the vote at maximum (the Zulu electorate), and in reality that level of voting unity among ethnic groups is rare. The division in the ANC could open up the field for more diverse politics and policies, as it could create an opening in South African politics that heretofore has been closed by the giant party’s straddling of the ideological spectrum.

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Other Sources of Party System Fluidity If the ANC does not break, what chances are there to introduce more flexibility into the party system? A different mix of political institutions could have brought out the conflict-reducing tendencies of South Africa’s current institutions while leading the country into more open politics. An alternative electoral system, perhaps combining elements of constituency and proportionality principles, could have forced opposition parties to seek support from among the country’s black voters earlier, truly pushing them into nonracial, issuebased mobilization.8 The provision for floor crossing could also provide for increased fluidity, but only if the 10 percent requirement is dropped from the legislation. Ceding more powers to the provinces and making them more attractive spheres for representation could strengthen the opposition parties. If provincial government meant more, and national power less, perhaps the Nats would have seriously considered reorganizing the party as a regional force, rather than dissolving it. Delinking provincial from national elections, a more costly option than the existing concurrent system and yet less costly than altering the balance of power in the country, might also raise the stakes of provincial contests. However it is achieved, more intense electoral competition at the provincial level could open up space in South African politics for a wider range of parties, which would probably respond to local issues and yet still not manipulate ethnicity, since many of the provinces are relatively ethnically homogenous outside of their main cities. A party like the Inkatha Freedom Party would remain a strong regional force; the Democratic Alliance would court the Western Cape and Gauteng; and smaller parties with regional bases would be more prolific. Parties like the African Christian Democratic Party would be a stronger force in the Western Cape, and parties like the Independent Democrats and the United Democratic Movement could create themselves as strong regional parties, slowly growing into national organizations. Under the current system, these parties have been forced to attempt national campaigns well before they were ready, which stunted internal party development and ultimately hurt the organizations. Finally, more regionalized politics would not only curtail ethnic mobilization, but would also discourage the racial mobilization that some claim has become the signature of opposition politics in South Africa. Unfortunately, as the ANC government has empowered local governments at the expense of the provincial tier, realignment on this level does not seem likely to happen either. Thus the future of party

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alignments in South Africa still seems tied to the unity or fragmentation of the ANC, and the party system—which should have been flexible into at least the first decade of transition—has remained stunted, with few effective parties that can attract voters. Party Stability at the Price of Democratic Atrophy? Stable political systems and peaceful elections may be good for South Africa, but they make for predictable politics and undramatic electoral processes. Static party systems with a dominant political party are, well . . . boring. By April 2004, journalists, notorious for their penchant for seeking controversial stories, had little to cover. The electoral process was perceived to be on track to such an extent that the European Union, United Nations, Commonwealth, and Carter Center all declined to send observer and monitor delegations to observe the 2004 polls. There was no large-scale political intimidation; the number of politically related deaths was minimal; and there were very few “hotspots” of conflict between rival parties. The list of potential trouble areas identified by the Independent Electoral Commission (IEC) included, for the most part, informal settlements where fires had destroyed people’s identity documents, potentially preventing them from voting.9 The IEC worried that these people would try to vote anyway, and could get violent when turned away.10 There were reports of intimidation in KZN and a few other areas, but overall the campaigns and voting day were overwhelmingly peaceful. The flip side of stability is that it breeds apathy, and in a new democracy, apathy can be dangerous. Democracies prove themselves at the polls and there are relatively few other ways for citizens to influence their leaders. In a party-centric system with no constituency links, the connection between citizens and representatives is even further diluted. When the majority of the citizenry is poor and often illiterate, they cannot simply travel to the capital or write a letter. Therefore, when citizens fail to vote, they deprive themselves of their already limited influence. Low voter turnout could also be interpreted as a decline in confidence. In the most recent national and provincial elections in South Africa, the major concern for political leaders and analysts was not voter intimidation, but voter apathy. South Africa has witnessed a steady decline not only in voter registration, but also in voter turnout. Participation in the national elections decreased by 30 percent between 1994 and 2004, reaching a low of just under 58 percent in 2004 (evaluated as a percentage of

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voting age population, VAP).11 Even in the ANC’s stronghold provinces, turnout has showed a remarkable decline not only since 1994, which was to be expected, but also from 1999. Given that “second elections” around the world tend to demonstrate lower levels of turnout than founding elections,12 it is not surprising that turnout should have declined between 1994 and 1999. The fact the turnout is continuing to decline into the 2004 elections and beyond has caused some to speculate that South African democracy has initiated a long, slow descent. Yet the 2004 turnout rates were not so low as to jeopardize the quality of South African democracy, and they indicated that participation rates in South Africa were beginning to approximate those of other countries at similar levels of economic development with dominant party systems.13 Analyzing the factors underlying this decrease often assumes political overtones. On the one hand, supporters of the ANC claim that “apathy” is not a problem and that it represents the normalization of the democratic process. On the other hand, critics of the ANC’s predominant position argue that the decline in registration and turnout are symptoms of a system in which people do not think that their vote will make a difference, and therefore are less inclined to bother to register and to vote. Whether apathy is simply part of the normalization process, or whether it is a symptom of declining democracy, it stems from the peaceful electoral process in a dominant party system, which guarantees that the outcome is determined well before election day. If today this stability seems unsurprising, return, for a moment, to the heady days of the early 1990s, when hope and fear kept the country delicately balanced on a tightrope. Nelson Mandela and the Robben Island prisoners were newly released; the ANC and PAC unbanned; and exiles began to return to help birth a new order. People were hopeful. At the same time, “Third Force” violence rendered the townships unstable; Zulus and Xhosas were fighting in the urban hostels on the East Rand; and political deaths were tallied in the hundreds per month in KwaZulu alone. Chris Hani’s assassination in April 1993 almost brought the entire transition to a halt and could have tipped the balance into civil war, and yet the country retreated from the brink, due to the efforts of both national and community leaders. South African politicians negotiated the new regime, creating an electoral system that was meant to promote the representation of multiple groups in parliament to create stability through diversity. The institutional structures created a dominant party system that has brought stability, but at a price. The same factors that have disincentivized ethnic mobilization have also created a

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party system so stable that elections appeared preordained; political change seemed unattainable; and political elites became increasingly corrupt. The public retreated and many became apathetic. Without the possibility of change, why bother to participate? In light of this and in the absence of reform of the country’s political institutions, the turbulence in the ANC could potentially shake up the political landscape enough to make South Africans care, once again, about their electoral processes and the parties that compete to represent them. Broader Implications How do these findings speak to the broader literature on democratization, political transition, ethnic politics, and the influence of institutions? Theoretically driven case studies can serve as building blocks in the creation of contextually grounded, middle-range comparative theories, and therefore the implications of this work travel well beyond South Africa. Insights from the South African experience push the boundaries of extant theory about the role of institutions in determining both the construction of ethnic identities and, more specifically, their mobilization in politics. As discussed in chapters 1 and 2, this project’s framework has drawn on the efforts of others in this field who have examined various facets of individual identity choice, the electoral incentives that push political actors to manipulate ethnic differences, the instances in which those efforts succeed, and the resulting patterns of political cleavages. A number of broader implications follow from this analysis. Among these, two stand out: how political institutions structure politics and influence the construction of political cleavages, and the relationship between democratization and ethnic violence. Institutions and Mobilization Strategies In this volume, I have expanded on earlier works that focused on individual identity choice to map out a set of institutional and social structural variables that jointly define the opportunities and constraints on the strategic choice and behavior of political parties. I have argued that focusing solely on the individual level is not sufficient to explain patterns of ethnic mobilization, because in transitional polities that are opening into democratic regimes, individuals may be less important than the political agents who mediate between individuals and the state. Political parties play this intermediary role, which renders them

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extremely influential during the critical periods when the new rules of the game are being specified and existing patterns of mobilization renegotiated. As political actors seek to redefine politics and build support bases, often in a short span of time, they look for information and organizational shortcuts, as do the voters. Institutions and social divisions represent competing repositories of information, which interactively inform the strategic choices of political actors and thereby contingently shape political outcomes. First, because groups vary in size and the type of ethnic markers that distinguish them, and because some groups can be nested within others or broken apart, there is great flexibility in the social and political construction of ethnic identities. The political importance of these groups stands in relation to other groups in the political unit and the relevant sphere of political competition. Elections for different levels of government (national, regional, or local) require specific support coalitions, and the relative political importance of different groups varies with their expected electoral utility and the ways in which they can be combined or separated. All these come together through the activities of political agents—in this case political parties—as they compete for power. When politicians and parties seek national power, they must build electoral support coalitions that can win seats at that level; when these same actors seek local power, they can craft different constituencies. It is this choice—between seeking national power and local power—that helps to determine whether politicians will opt to mobilize ethnicity. Once the tier of power is decided upon, parties then survey the ways in which groups can be combined to achieve desired electoral results. This project also suggests that the electoral system’s influence on the party system and the politicization of personal identities cannot be considered in isolation of the other political institutions in a country. Electoral systems determine the formula for winning seats, but the locus of power in the political system determines the size of the coalitions that are necessary to win in those electoral systems. Under the right conditions, PR systems will not create politics of the lowest common denominator, nor will they cause a fragmentation of the party system.14 The South African case demonstrates that the electoral system may in fact be much less important than the location of power in the political system and how that interacts with the social landscape of the country. In political systems where power resides at the center, small parties are less likely to obtain sufficient representation in the national parliament to exert much influence, reducing the incentive to fragment into smaller and smaller parties. Party agency

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CONCLUSION

then becomes the key factor in determining what type of mobilization will develop, and the political cleavages along which partisan competition will form. In South Africa, the result has been to keep ethnic identities latent and to elevate the salience of other societal divisions. How political institutions interact with each other and the social landscape of a country is perhaps the most empirically generalizable finding of the study. Whether or not social groups are large enough to render courting them an electorally rewarding strategy depends not just on the electoral system, but also on the level of government for which their support is being sought. The effects of one may enhance or counteract the other, and the specific outcomes will ultimately rest on the particular context of the country in which they are created. The same constellation of institutional features can produce alternative sets of outcomes, depending on the different social structures and preexisting balance of power in a country. As an heuristic device, consider the matrix of mobilization strategies shown in table 9.1. It lays out the basic argument advanced in this volume in its simplest Table 9.1 Mobilization Strategy Incentive Matrix

Locus of Competition for Power

Ethnic Demography High Fragmentation (one dominant group and multiple small groups, large numbers of small groups)

Low Fragmentation (Small number of large groups, homogenous societies)

National (centralized system with intense competition at the national tier)

(A) High incentive to mobilize national-level identity groups: ethnic where there is one dominant group and either nonethnic or aggregated identities if multiple small groups.

(B) Incentive to aggregate local identity groups into larger-order identities and/or mobilize interestbased groups.

Local (decentralized system with intense competition at lower tiers of government)

(C) Little incentive to mobilize national-level identity groups.

(D) High incentive to mobilize identity-based groups with local relevance.

Incentive to activate divisions within national identity groups or pursue nonethnic mobilization; or to mobilize the numerous small groups as they are.

National-level competition likely to be nonethnic or explicit multiethnic coalitions.

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form, predicting national patterns of mobilization under different social and institutional setups. In reality these are not dichotomous variables and the societal fragmentation patterns are much more complex, but for the sake of simplicity, assume that across the country as a whole society is either highly fragmented or not, and power is either nationalized or not. From this, we can extrapolate predicted outcomes for political mobilization. In the centralized power systems, the concentration of power in the national tier necessitates political actors to mobilize nationally relevant groups. If the society is highly fragmented (cell A), with one large ethnic group and multiple small groups, the ethnic groups are less likely to hold national relevance and political actors are less likely to choose strategies based on the small ethnic groups. The particular axis of identity may vary, as demonstrated in the difference between the First and Second Republics in Nigeria. In each case, the federal divisions led political parties and actors to mobilize national-level constituencies, but the precise axis of mobilization changed when the country went from two federal regions to three. In a system that nationalizes power, societies with multiple small groups are less likely to witness ethnic mobilization. Parties will either seek to aggregate the small ethnic groups into larger ethnic, regional, or linguistic aggregations (as seen in Mozambique since 1992 with the emergence of regional, multiethnic parties), or to pursue multidimensional strategies, as has been the case in South Africa since 1994. Societies with less fragmentation and concentrated power are also less likely to witness ethnic mobilization (cell B). If the society is homogenous, as in Botswana, the ethnic group becomes politically irrelevant at the national level. In this case, clan and lineage may be activated (as in Somalia before dissolution in 1991), or parties may pursue nonidentity-based politics (as in Botswana). Decentralized power provides little incentive to mobilize ethnic groups at the national tier in systems that are highly fragmented (cell C). Once again, the specific type of fragmentation matters; in countries with one dominant group, ethnic divisions are not likely to be politically relevant in the national tier, because the relevant tier of power divides the dominant ethnic group into geographically distributed seats of power. Parties are just as likely to pursue nonethnic mobilization as they are to seek to activate divisions within the dominant group, while the other smaller ethnic groups may be mobilized as they are. Here, the structure of division within the groups becomes important. When the Department of State’s Iraq Study Group recommended creating a federal and electoral system in Iraq that would

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activate the country’s tribal divisions, they had this logic in mind, as that level of identity politics would have cut through the Sunni-Shi’a divide.15 The countries that are most likely to experience ethnic politics of a competitive but nondestructive nature are the fragmented societies with localized power and multiple small groups. There is a double incentive in this system not to mobilize national-level ethnic politics. For one, political competition focuses at the local level, and so there is little incentive to attempt to aggregate the groups into nationallevel blocs. While parties are likely to mobilize ethnic groups locally, national politics are more likely to either involve fluid ethnic coalition building or entirely nonethnic politics. Nigeria in the Fourth Republic provides a good example here; with the proliferation of states that has occurred since the Second Republic, the destabilizing Ibo-Hausa/ Fulani-Yoruba competition has dissolved into a system of extremely fluid coalitional politics involving larger and smaller ethnic groups. Finally, decentralized but less fragmented societies (cell D) are also likely to have nonethnic national politics or very explicitly multiethnic coalitional politics at the national level. Ethiopia since 1991 serves as an example here; with eleven ethnofederal regions, politics at the center involves a delicate balancing of ethnic groups in explicit multiethnic parties, accompanied by a range of ethnic regional parties. The ethnofederal regions serve as an organizational platform for the regional parties, but each one is too small to gain national power. Conclusion: Prospects for Conflict during Political Transition The brief exercise in mapping potential patterns of mobilization demonstrates the complexity inherent in a relatively simple concept. There is no one specific way to predict how parties will seek to politically manipulate the complexities of a country’s societal divides. The process will be contingent upon a number of social and institutional factors, and how they interact during the transitional period. What does unambiguously follow from this perspective is that if patterns of mobilization are this fluid, divisive ethnic mobilization and conflict cannot possibly be inherent when ethnically divided societies undergo political transition. In chapter 1, I reviewed the theories that anticipate ethnic violence accompanying political opening. These varied perspectives relied on three key assumptions. First, many of these authors took as a given that ethnic identities become automatic building blocks during periods of

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political transition. Second, these authors placed great emphasis on the institutional vacuum that accompanies transition, because when given new rules requiring mass support, politicians were free to craft extremist appeals that mobilized ethnic groups, which then created violence. Third, the state weakness school posited that the institutional vacuum created by transition or weakened state institutions suspended normal politics and security controls, creating a security dilemma that ethnic groups would seek to remedy through violence. I have already discussed the first of these assumptions, and here briefly review the last two. The institutional vacuum that supposedly accompanies political transition is never as complete as often discussed. Most countries experience continuity across political regimes—in the form of a transitional government, political actors and organizations, and the security sector. Transitional governments, common across a variety of world regions and transitional settings, provide a bridge between old and new orders thus ensuring order and governance in the midst of massive change.16 This prevents the absence of state control that is an essential first step according to the accounts of many of those who expect political transition to engender ethnic violence. Temporary regimes have managed transitions that were simple cases of regime change as well as more complex transitions from war to peace, in countries such as El Salvador, Guatemala, Indonesia, Burundi, the DRC, Liberia, Cambodia, East Timor, and Kosovo. Aside from the continuity provided by transitional governments, there is often continuity in political actors as well. Many of the actors who were powerful at the end of the old regime are still powerful in the new one, even if they must shift the basis on which they obtain and retain power.17 As they shift strategies and build new support blocs, political actors rapidly adapt their strategies to the new institutions. The “institutional vacuum” that accompanies a democratic transition, if it exists at all, is likely to exist for only a very short period, not long enough for the sustained mobilization of ethnic groups into political divides. Of course, such continuity of political actors may not be an unqualified positive influence. The phrase “old wine in new bottles,” often used to characterize Nigerian politics, is not a compliment. The transition of violent warlords into government ministers, useful to secure their participation in the new order, also has a tradeoff for grassroots legitimacy. Nevertheless, it is not uncommon for old politicians and influential actors in the previous order to remain influential in the new, which again reduces the “vacuum” that is thought to accompany

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political transition. Such continuity is likely to apply even in postconflict transitional regimes, which are the situations in which the institutional vacuum and security dilemma dynamics are predicted to create posttransition ethnic conflict. Many postconflict transitions are governed by some form of power-sharing agreement, and because the architects of these agreements are often concerned with the potential for spoilers, the agreements often cede power to all influential actors at the time that the accords are signed.18 Thus transitional governments are likely to be populated by those who were already powerful, thereby again providing a measure of continuity from the old regime. Finally, the growing literature on security sector reform in transitional regimes demonstrates that the security apparatus is rarely suspended, even during times of transition.19 Yes, the security sector needs to be reformed, as did the South African Defence Force, but the cases of pure breakdown of all internal order are rare. Serious problems with security sector reform may not even appear in the early phases of a political transition; they may, as in South Africa, develop only several years into the new democratic era.20 Thus theories that predict the process of democratic transition will lead to ethnic conflict because of the security dilemma may not necessarily hold, as not all institutions of the state are created anew with the new regime. In South Africa, for example, the transition was governed by an interim government. The Transitional Executive Council (TEC) operated between 1992 and the inauguration of the new administration in 1994. The TEC served as the executive and organized the electoral process, with international assistance, and provided an orderly, rule-governed transition between regimes. Political actors operated under new rules and in an expanded electorate, but the continued participation of major political organizations across different regimes imparted a measure of stability and all their activities were bounded by the governance provided by the TEC. Finally, while there were plans for its restructuring, the South African Defense Force (SADF) maintained order within the country during the critical transition period. The state and its institutions remained relatively strong during the transition, preventing the creation of a security dilemma; allowing no opportunity for the manipulation of informational networks without impunity, and in the expanded electorate, political agents did not generate patterns of exclusive, competitive, and conflict-prone ethnic mobilization. What this work points to is an understanding that ethnic violence is not inherent in political transition. Ethnic groups become sources

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of large-scale violence only when organized, and they are less likely to be organized into enduring political cleavages when political institutions structure strategic actions away from the ethnic prism. In many societies there actually may be far more room for constitutional and institutional engineering to influence the way in which political competition will develop than has been previously considered. There is no uniform solution, however; the precise effect of institutional engineering will depend on the nature of social divisions in a particular setting. Centralizing power can create ethnic conflict in certain situations, instead of diffusing the potential, as in South Africa. Political elites will manipulate social groups and political identities to acquire power, and the ways that institutions structure incentives helps to determine whether that manipulation turns violent or merely stays competitive. Democracy and conflict are neither entwined nor preordained; democracy provokes ethnic conflict only when its institutions encourage the mobilization of exclusive and zero-sum competition between ethnic groups.

Notes

1

Introduction: Ethnic Mobilization during Democratization

1. See Jessica Piombo, “Political Parties, Social Demographics and the Decline of Ethnic Mobilization in South Africa, 1994–1999,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (July 2005): 447–470. 2. See, for example Donald Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1991) and Arend Lijphart, “The Politics of Transition in South Africa: Report of a Faculty Seminar,” PS: Political Science and Politics 26, no. 3 (September 1993): 534–535. 3. A partial list of these regimes during the 1960s and ’70s includes Benin (single party), Chad (single party), Comoros (single party), Republic of Congo (single party), Equatorial Guinea (single party), Gabon (de facto single party), Ghana (single party and military rule), Guinea (single party), Guinea Bissau (single party), Kenya (de facto single party), Madagascar (military rule), Malawi (single party), Mali (single party), Niger (single party and military rule), Rwanda (single party), Seychelles (single party), Sierra Leone (coups and then single party), Tanzania (single party), Togo (single party), and Zambia (single party). This classification is based on the author’s analysis. 4. Donald L. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1985); Donald L. Horowitz, “Democracy in Divided Societies,” Journal of Democracy 4, no. 4 (October 1993): 18–38; Jack Snyder From Voting to Violence: Democratization and Nationalist Conflict (New York: W.W. Norton, 2000); Marina Ottaway, Democracy and Ethnic Nationalism: African and Eastern European Experiences, ODC Policy Essay No. 141994. On the general relationship between democracy and war, see Edward Mansfield and Jack Snyder, “Democratization and the Danger of War,” International Security 20, no. 1 (Summer 1995): 5–37, and “Democratization and War,” Foreign Affairs 74, no. 3 (May–June 1995): 79–97.

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NOTES

5. A procedural definition of democratization is found in the works of Joseph Schumpeter and Robert Dahl. See Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (Harper & Brothers, 1942), and Robert Dahl, Polyarchy: Participation and Opposition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1971). 6. Kanchan Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed: Patronage and Ethnic Head Counts in India (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 2. 7. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 52. 8. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 7. 9. Jack Snyder, From Voting to Violence. For comprehensive overviews of theories of ethnic conflict, see Michael Brown, “Ethnic and Internal Conflicts,” in Turbulent Peace: The Challenges of Managing International Conflict (Washington, DC: USIP Press, 2001), and Ashutosh Varshney, Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002), particularly 18–39. 10. See, for example, David A. Lake and Donald Rothchild, “Containing Fear: The Origins and Management of Ethnic Conflict,” International Security 21, no. 2 (Autumn 1996): 41–75. Lake and Rothchild present a variation of Barry Posen’s ethnic conflict and security dilemma thesis, applied to transitional periods. 11. Lake and Rothchild, “Containing Fear.” 12. See, for example, Beverly Crawford, “The Causes of Cultural Conflict: An Institutional Approach,” in The Myth of “Ethnic Conflict,” ed. Beverly Crawford and Ronnie Lipschutz, International and Area Research Series No. 98 (University of California, Berkeley, 1998), 3–43, 11. 13. See James R. Scarritt and Shaheen Mozaffar, “The Specification of Ethnic Cleavages and Ethnopolitical Groups for the Analysis of Democratic Competition in Contemporary Africa,” Nationalism and Ethnic Politics 5, no. 1 (1999): 82–117. In a later article, Mozaffar, Scarritt, and Galaich count a group as ethnopolitical only if it has been politically mobilized for at least ten years before a first election (Shaheen Mozaffar, James R. Scarritt, and Glen Galaich, “Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Institutions, and Party Systems in Africa’s Emerging Democracies,” American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (August 2003): 379–390, 383. Mozaffar and Scarritt’s most recent work begins to ask why certain dimensions of ethnicity are politicized while others remain latent (Shaheen Mozaffar and James R. Scarritt, “Patterns of Ethnopolitical Cleavages in Africa,” unpublished manuscript, 2009). 14. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 108. 15. Edward Shils, “Primordial, Personal, Sacred and Civil Ties: Some Particular Observations on the Relationships of Sociological Research and Theory,” British Journal of Sociology 8, no. 2 (June 1957): 130–145;

NOTES

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25.

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Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict (particularly chapter 2); Harold Isaacs, “Basic Group Identity: The Idols of the Tribe,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience, ed. Nathan Glazer and Daniel P. Moynihan (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution: Primordial Sentiments and Civil Politics in the New States,” in Old Societies and New States: The Quest for Modernity in Asia and Africa, ed. Clifford Geertz (New York: Free Press, 1963). Robert Bates, “Ethnic Competition and Modernization in Contemporary Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 6, no. 4 (January 1974): 457–483; Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Nathan Glazer and Daniel Patrick Moynihan, “Introduction,” in Ethnicity: Theory and Experience (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1975); Frederick Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries (Boston: Little Brown, 1969). Bruce Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and William Kymlicka, “Ethnicity and Democracy in Historical & Comparative Perspective,” in Ethnicity and Democracy in Africa, ed. Bruce Berman, Dickson Eyoh, and Will Kymlicka (Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2004), 3. For an early definitive treatment of the subject, see Crawford Young, “Nationalism, Ethnicity and Class in Africa: A Retrospective,” Cahiers d’Etudes Africaines 26, no. 3 (1986): 421–495. See, for example, Daniel Posner, Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Africa (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Naomi Chazan et al., Politics and Society in Contemporary Africa, 3rd ed. (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1999), 108. Abner Cohen, Custom and Politics in Urban Africa (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969); Berman, Eyoh, and Kymlicka, “Ethnicity and Democracy.” See Courtney Jung, “Race, Ethnicity, Religion,” in The Oxford Handbook of Contextual Political Analysis, ed. Robert E. Goodin and Charles Tilly (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006). David Laitin, Hegemony and Culture: Politics and Religious Change among the Yoruba (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1986). Leroy Vail, The Creation of Tribalism in Southern Africa (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1989), and Joshua Forrest, Subnationalism in Africa: Ethnicity, Alliance and Politics (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 2004). Courtney Jung, Then I Was Black: South African Political Identities in Transition (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). For an excellent treatment of this, see the documentary “Race: The Power of an Illusion,” California Newsreel, 2003, especially Episode 3, The House We Live In, by Executive Producer, Larry Adelman; Episode Producers, Christine Herbes-Sommers, Tracy Strain, and Llewellyn Smith; and Series Coproducer, Jean Cheng.

186

NOTES

26. Anthony Marx, Making Race and Nation: A Comparison of the United States, South Africa, and Brazil (New York and Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2. 27. Crawford and Lipschutz, especially Crawford’s theoretical introduction, “The Causes of Cultural Conflict: An Institutional Approach.” For one of the best detailed case studies of the Russians and how they adapted in the post-Soviet era, see David Laitin, Identity in Formation: The Russian-Speaking Populations in the Near Abroad (New York: Cornell University Press, 1998). 28. Johanna Kristin Birnir, Ethnicity and Electoral Politics (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 29. Chandra, Why Ethnic Parties Succeed, see especially chapter 2. 30. James R. Scarritt, “Communal Conflict and Contention for Power in Africa South of the Sahara,” in Minorities at Risk: A Global View of Ethnopolitical Conflicts, ed. Ted Robert Gurr (Washington, DC: U. S. Institute of Peace Press, 1993); Julius O. Ihonvbere, “The ‘Irrelevant’ State: Ethnicity and the Quest for Nationhood in Africa,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 17, no 1. (January 1994): 42–60; Dunstan M. Wai, “Sources of Communal Conflicts and Secessionist Politics in Africa,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 1, no. 3 (July 1978): 286–303; Henry S. Bienen, “The State and Ethnicity: Integrative Formulas in Africa,” in Armed Forces, Conflict and Change in Africa (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1989); Larry Diamond, “Review Article: Ethnicity and Conflict,” Journal of Modern African Studies 25, no. 1 (1987): 117–128; Harvey Glickman, ed., Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa (Atlanta, GA: African Studies Association Press, 1995). 31. Eric D. Weitz, A Century of Genocide: Utopias of Race and Nation (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2003), especially 190–235; and V. P. Gagnon, Jr., “Serbia’s Road to War,” in Nationalism, Ethnic Conflict and Democracy, ed. Larry Diamond and Marc Plattner (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994). 32. V. P. Gagnon, Jr., The Myth of Ethnic War: Serbia and Croatia in the 1990s (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2004). 33. Kristen P. Williams, “Internationalization of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans: The Breakup of Yugoslavia,” in Ethnic Conflict and International Politics: Explaining Diffusion and Escalation, ed. Steven Lobell and Philip Mauceri (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 75–94. 34. Mozaffar and Scarritt, “Patterns of Ethnopolitical Cleavages.” 35. Daniel Ziblatt, “Of Course to Generalize, but How Much?” APSA-CP Newsletter 17, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 8–11. Ziblatt writes: “[T]he best middle-range theory begins with real-world empirical puzzles, then weighs the analytical power of competing arguments to explain both process and outcomes, and finally develops broader arguments out of specific empirical findings” (8).

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187

36. Cf. Clifford Geertz, “Thick Descriptions: Toward an Interpretive Theory of Cultures,” in The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973). 37. For detailed analyses of the logic of ethnic voting and the individual basis of ethnic identity in South Africa, see Karen E. Ferree “The Microfoundations of Ethnic Voting: Evidence from South Africa,” Afrobarometer Working Paper No. 40 (2004), and Courtney Jung, Then I Was Black. Posner’s Institutions and Ethnic Politics in Zambia examines the bottom-up formation of politicized ethnic cleavage in Zambia, though since a critical component of his argument relies on the “coalition choices of political actors,” (8) our two analyses complement each other rather than compete. 38. Donald L. Horowitz, The Deadly Ethnic Riot (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2001). 39. Since the conception of this project, the DP and the NNP merged into a single party, the Democratic Alliance, in July 2000, and then split back into their original organizations in September 2001. They ran as separate parties in the 1999 elections, as the joint party in the December 2000 (municipal) elections, and as separate parties in the 2004 national elections. By the 2006 local elections, the NNP had ceased to exist as an independent political organization, and most of its members had been absorbed into the ANC. In this work, the two parties are kept separate when they are discussed as distinct entities, and the joint DA is discussed in reference to the 2000 municipal elections. References to the DP have been replaced by references to the DA in all post-July 2000 discussions, since the existing DA organization is basically the DP. 40. On the uses and utility of case study approaches, see John Gerring, “What Is a Case Study and What Is It Good For?” APSR 98, no. 2 (May 2004): 341–354. For a few classic proponents of the case study approach, see Harry Eckstein, “Case Study and Theory in Political Science,” in Handbook of Political Science, vol. 7, ed. Fred Greenstein and Nelson Polsby (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1975); and Alexander George, “Case Studies and Theory Development: The Method of Structured Focused Comparison,” in Diplomacy: New Approaches in History, Theory, and Policy, ed. Paul Lauren (New York: Free Press, 1979) who argue for the use of case studies in this approach.

2

Shaping Strategies of Political Mobilization

1. See, for example, Benjamin Reilly, Democracy in Divided Societies: Electoral Engineering for Conflict Management (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001) for a recent and comprehensive work on the subject. The full discussion of this literature can be found in chapter 3.

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2. Robert Putnam, Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), and Shaheen Mozaffar, “The Institutional Logic of Ethnic Politics: A Prolegomenon,” in Ethnic Conflict and Democratization in Africa. 3. Donald L. Horowitz, A Democratic South Africa? Constitutional Engineering in a Divided Society (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press, 1991); Arend Lijphart, Electoral Systems and Party Systems: A Study of Twenty-Seven Democracies, 1945–1990 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1994); Mozaffar, “The Institutional Logic”; Andrew Reynolds, Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Andrew Reynolds and Benjamin Reilly, The International IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design (Stockholm, Sweden: International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance, 1997); Giovanni Sartori, Parties and Party Systems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976); and Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering: An Inquiry into Structures, Incentives and Outcomes (New York: New York University Press, 1994). The classic works on this subject include Giovanni Sartori, “The Influence of Electoral Systems: Faulty Laws or Faulty Method?” in Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, ed. Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart (New York: Agathon, 1986); Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering; Lijphart, Electoral Systems; Arend Lijphart, Democracy in Plural Societies: A Comparative Exploration (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977); and Arend Lijphart, Patterns of Democracy: Government Forms and Performance in TwentySix Countries (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999). Andrew Reynolds in Electoral Systems and Democratization in Southern Africa, provides a comprehensive overview of the impact of electoral systems on democratization, including a chapter discussing the tradeoffs involved in choosing alternate electoral systems. 4. To date, most analyses of the nonmechanical effects of electoral systems have focused on coalition building, proportionality, and the representation of women. See Dennis Farrell, Comparing Electoral Systems (New York: Prentice Hall, 1997), chapter 7. Regarding proportionality, the general consensus is that district magnitude is the most important determinant of proportionality (Rein Taagepera and Matthew Soberg Shugart, Seats and Votes: The Effects and Determinants of Electoral Systems [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989]), and that electoral formulas most heavily influence the number of parties. Early works found that ballot structure had virtually no impact on proportionality (Douglass Rae, The Political Consequences of Electoral Laws [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967]), but in his Electoral Systems and Party Systems Lijphart later found some influence of ballot structure on proportionality.

NOTES

189

5. Maurice Duverger’s Political Parties: Their Organization and Activity in the Modern State (New York: Wiley, 1954) is the seminal work in this subset of the field. Duverger’s “law” sparked off a debate over whether proportional representation created multipartyism, or whether countries that already had multiparty systems tended to choose proportional representation electoral formulas. See William Riker, “Duverger’s Law Revisited,” and Sartori, “The Influence of Electoral Systems: Faulty Laws or Faulty Method?” both in Electoral Laws and Their Political Consequences, ed. Bernard Grofman and Arend Lijphart, for both sides of the debate; consult Farrell, Comparing Electoral Systems for the synthesis. 6. Reynolds, Electoral Systems and Democratization. 7. Comments of Carina Perelli, the chief of the United Nations Electoral Assistance Division, cited in Adeed Dawisha and Larry Diamond, “Iraq’s Year of Voting Dangerously,” Journal of Democracy 17, no. 2 (April 2006): 89–103, 93. 8. Whether ethnic groups should be accommodated or forced to cooperate with one another constitutes the basic disagreement between Arend Lijphart and Donald Horowitz. More recently, Benjamin Reilly has argued that electoral systems that compel cooperation between groups provide more stable outcomes than those that provide group protections, while Andrew Reynolds leans more toward group protections for conflict resolution. 9. Jung, Then I Was Black, 27. 10. Joel Barkan, “Elections in Agrarian Societies,” Journal of Democracy 6, no. 4 (October 1995): 106–116. 11. The IDEA Handbook of Electoral System Design and the works of Reilly and Reynolds, all discuss the full menu of electoral systems and their anticipated effects on party systems and conflict. 12. John Coakley, ed., The Territorial Management of Ethnic Conflict (London: Frank Cass, 1993). 13. Nancy Bermeo, “The Import of Institutions,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (April 2002): 96–110, 107. 14. Larry J. Diamond, Class, Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria: The Failure of the First Republic (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1988); Rotimi T. Suberu, “The Struggle for New States in Nigeria, 1976–1990,” African Affairs 90, no. 361 (1991): 499–522; John A. Ayoade, “Ethnic Management in the 1979 Nigerian Constitution,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 16, no. 2 (Spring 1986): 73–90. 15. Andrew J. Milnor, “Institutions,” in Comparative Political Parties: Selected Readings, ed. Andrew J. Milnor (New York: Crowell, 1969). Daniel Posner recently argued that regime type exerts similar influences. Daniel N. Posner, “Regime Change and Ethnic Cleavages in Africa,” Comparative Political Studies 40, no. 11 (November 2007): 302–327.

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NOTES

16. This is an insight adapted from my own earlier work on South Africa, as well as from John A. Ayoade “Ethnic Management in the 1979 Nigerian Constitution,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 16 (Spring 1986): 73–90; Rotimi T. Suberu, Federalism and Ethnic Conflict in Nigeria (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2001); Rotimi T. Suberu, “Federalism and Nigeria’s Political Future: A Comment,” African Affairs, no. 348 (1988): 431–439, and Daniel Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference: Why Chewas and Tumbukas Are Allies in Zambia and Adversaries in Malawi,” American Political Science Review 98, no. 4 (2004): 529–545. Posner was analyzing individual identity selection rather than party strategies, but the logic holds. 17. Paul Lazarsfield, Bernard Berelson, and Hazel Gaudet, The People’s Choice: How the Voter Makes Up His Mind in a Presidential Campaign (New York: Columbia University Press, 1948); Bernard Berelson, Paul Lazarsfield, and William McPhee, Voting: A Study of Opinion Formation in a Presidential Campaign (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1954). 18. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan, “Cleavage Structures, Party Systems and Voter Alignments: An Introduction,” in Party Systems and Voter Alignments: Cross-National Perspectives, ed. Seymour Martin Lipset and Stein Rokkan (New York: Free Press, 1967). 19. See Richard Rose and Derek Urwin, “Social Cohesion, Political Parties and Strains in Regimes,” Comparative Political Studies 2 (1969); and Richard Rose, “Comparability in Electoral Studies,” in Electoral Behavior: A Comparative Handbook, ed. Richard Rose (New York: Free Press, 1974). 20. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict; Clifford Geertz, “The Integrative Revolution.” 21. Lazarsfield et al., The People’s Choice; Berelson et al., Voting. 22. Some of the earliest works in the revisionist literature include Gerard Lowenburg, “The Remaking of the German Party System: Political and Socioeconomic Factors,” Polity 1 (Fall 1968), and Gosta EspingAnderson, “Social Class, Social Democracy and the State: Party Policy and Party Decomposition in Denmark and Sweden,” Comparative Politics 11 (October 1978). 23. Horowitz, Ethnic Groups in Conflict, 7. 24. Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference.” 25. Mozaffar, Scarritt and Galaich, “Electoral Institutions, Ethnopolitical Cleavages,” 379–390. 26. William Claggett, Jeffrey Loesch, W. Phillips Shively and Ronald Snell, “Political Leadership and the Development of Political Cleavages: Imperial Germany, 1871–1912,” American Journal of Political Science 26, no. 4 (November 1982): 643–663. 27. Ibid., 653–654.

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191

28. For an analysis, see Andreas Wimmer, “Democracy and EthnoReligious Conflict in Iraq,” paper presented at the Center for Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law, Stanford University, May 5, 2003, http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20214/wimmer.pdf (accessed on February 1, 2007). 29. Barbara Bodine, “Reaping the Whirlwind: Can We Leave Iraq Better than How We Came In?” Lecture at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, CA, February 8, 2006. Ambassador Bodine was a member of the “Futures of Iraq” project of the Department of State, served as coordinator for postconflict reconstruction in Baghdad and the central provinces of Iraq, and is the senior fellow and director, the Governance Initiative in the Middle East, the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. 30. See Coakley, Territorial Management; Ulrich Schneckener and Stefan Wolff, eds., Managing and Settling Ethnic Conflicts: Perspectives on Successes and Failures in Europe, Africa and Asia (New York and London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). Horowitz (Ethnic Groups in Conflict) provides a prime example of this focus, as does Benjamin Reilly, “Electoral Systems for Divided Societies,” Journal of Democracy 13, no. 2 (2002): 156–170. As an example, in his volume on electoral engineering, Benjamin Reilly does not even once consider the way that federal and electoral systems interact to shape development of political parties and the bases on which they campaign (Reilly, Democracy in Divided Societies).

3


1. Parliament functioned as a Constituent Assembly from 1994 to 1996, drafting the final constitution (ratified in 1996) during this time. 2. The Harare Declaration was promulgated by an ad hoc committee of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), and its text is available on the Web site of the ANC, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/history/ transition/harare.html (accessed on February 23, 2007). The declaration put forth a set of principles for a democratic South Africa that were the ANC’s core negotiating principles in the late 1980s and early ’90s. 3. See Heather Deegan, The Politics of the New South Africa: Apartheid and After (New York: Pearson Education, 2001); Timothy Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995); and Allister Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country: The Inside Story of South Africa’s Road to Change (New York: Hill and Wang, 1995). 4. Marion Edmunds, “Party Lists Stay,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), April 19, 1996; Mervyn Frost, “Preparing for Democracy in an Authoritarian State,” in Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994, ed. R. W. Johnson

192

NOTES

5. 6. 7.

8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

16. 17.

and Lawrence Schlemmer (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996). Frost, “Preparing for Democracy,” 32. Tom Lodge, South African Politics since 1994 (Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Phillip, 1999). See Schedules 4 and 5 of the 1996 Constitution, “Functional Areas of Concurrent National and Provincial Legislative Competence,” and “Functional Areas of Exclusive Provincial Legislative Competence” for the list of powers. Exclusive provincial powers include only abattoirs, ambulance services, archives other than national archives, libraries other than national libraries, liquor licenses, museums other than national museums, provincial planning, provincial cultural matters, provincial recreation and amenities, provincial sport, provincial roads and traffic, and veterinary services, excluding regulation of the profession. All other powers are held concurrent with the national government. David Pottie, “The First Five Years of Provincial Government,” in Election ’99 South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki. ed. Andrew Reynolds (Cape Town: David Phillip; New York: St. Martin’s, 1999). Stephen Friedman, “Power to the Provinces,” Siyaya, no. 4 (May 1, 1995), http://www.idasa.org.za/ (accessed on March 18, 2002). The sunset clauses were designed to protect Afrikaners employed in the civil service. The incoming government could not fire existing civil servants; it could only replace them as they retired. Quoted in Charlene Smith, “Give the Provinces Taxation Rights,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), February 12, 1999, http://www.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/990212/NEWS43.html (accessed on March 7, 2002). Idasa, Budget Watch, no 37 (October 10, 2001). In 2001, the Provincial Revenue Taxation Act was finally passed by the National Assembly, which set out some of the regulations that should pave the way for provinces to develop their own tax bases. There was much debate surrounding the passage of this bill, some of it pertaining to whether or not provinces needed the regulatory bill to be passed to initiate their own taxation legislation. For extended discussion, see Joachim Wehner, “Fiscal Federalism in South Africa,” Publius: The Journal of Federalism 30, no. 3 (Summer 2000): 47–72. Pottie, “The First Five Years;” Lodge, South African Politics. Smith, “Give the Provinces Taxation Rights.” Barney Mthombothi, “An Unruly Majority,” Financial Mail, May 26, 2000, http://www.fm.co.za/00/0526/currents/ebarn. htm (accessed on October 18, 2000). Pottie, “The First Five Years.” Calland, Richard, ed. The First Five Years: A Review of South Africa’s Democratic Parliament (Cape Town: Institute for Democracy in South Africa, 1999).

NOTES

193

18. The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa, 1996, Sections 46 (1) (d) and 105[1]. 19. This system of awarding seats is used in highest average list PR and STV electoral systems. 20. The parties were the United Christian Democratic Front, the Freedom Front, the Federal Alliance, the Afrikaner EenheidsBeweging Party, the Azanian People’s Organization, and the Minority Front. 21. Frost, “Preparing for Democracy.” 22. Holomisa was expelled from the ANC after he publicly accused Stella Sigcau, an influential figure in the party, of corruption in the Eastern Cape. 23. It should be noted that certain provincial administrations have experienced success in pushing national government policy in certain areas, notably in the case of government policy on HIV/AIDS and the dissemination of AZT (azidothymidine), but for the most part these successes are few and far between, and where they do occur they rarely offer tangible resources. 24. The legitimacy of these terms is often contested, but for sake of continuity with other works on South Africa, I use these four labels to denote the four acknowledged race groups. The spelling of “Coloured” follows the South African convention, and “Indians” refers to people of South Asian descent. The arbitrariness of some of these categorizations is discussed in this section. 25. All figures in this section are drawn from the 1996 census. There is debate over the accuracy of this census, and one was taken again in 2001, but since 1996 represents a midpoint in the period under investigation here, the analysis is using the data. The census information was obtained from Statistics South Africa (STATS-SA) in 1999. 26. See Les Switzer, Power and Resistance in an African Society: Ciskei Xhosa and the Making of Modern South Africa (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993) for an extensive history. 27. CIA, World Factbook, http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ geos/lt.html and http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/ geos/bc.html (accessed on March 29, 2006). 28. See J. D. Omer-Cooper, History of Southern Africa, 2nd ed. (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1994), especially 8–11. 29. See Ibid., chapter 8, on the origins of apartheid and its relationship to divisions between English and Afrikaans speakers. 30. G. H. L. Le May, The Afrikaners: An Historical Interpretation (Cambridge, MA and Oxford: Blackwell, 1995). 31. Gerhard Mare, Ethnicity and Politics in South Africa (New Jersey and London: Zed Books, 1993), 32–33. 32. See Jung, Then I Was Black, for an extensive treatment of the development of the Afrikaner identity. 33. In Afrikaans, the term often used for Coloureds, bruin mense, literally means brown people. Some Coloured people call themselves

194

34. 35. 36.

37.

38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

NOTES

bruin Afrikaners (Peter Marias, “Too Long in the Twilight,” in Now that We Are Free: Coloured Communities in a Democratic South Africa, ed. Wilmot James, Daria Caliguire, and Kerry Cullinan Wilmot James [Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1996, 60]). Many others refer to “brown South Africans” and “brown communities.” Yunus Carrim, “Minorities Together and Apart,” in Now that We Are Free, 47. Ibid. “Besides being South African, which group do you feel you belong to?” This question was part of a survey administered in July–August 2000 by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa). Answers mentioning language or ethnic groups were coded as ethnic category; mentions of “race” or a specific racial group as the racial categories, and so on. Analysis was done by the author. The figures were taken from South African portion of the Southern African Barometer project. Hennie Kotzé, Culture, Ethnicity and Religion: South African Perceptions of Social Identity (Johannesburg: Konrad-Adenauer Stiftung, 1997), 8. Kotzé, Culture, Ethnicity and Religion. The specific question asked was the following: “When people talk about culture, language and values they see themselves in many different ways. Please take a moment to look at all of the terms on the list and choose the one term that you would use to describe yourself.” The terms used in the structured questions were based on the answers of an open-ended question on a 1994 survey conducted by Idasa staff member Robert Mattes. Kotzé, Culture, Ethnicity and Religion, 10. The results of the survey were reported by Business Day on August 24, 2001, and the text of the SAIRR press release can be found at http://www.sairr.org.za/wsc/pstory.htx?storyID=228 (accessed on August 27, 2001). These findings are echoed by scores of public opinion data that have identified crime, the economy, and unemployment as consistently ranking among the top three concerns listed by South Africans in opinion surveys. For an early proponent of the racial census idea, see R. W. Johnson, “The 1994 Election: Outcome and Analysis,” in Launching Democracy in South Africa, entire chapter, but especially 319. Johnson argued that the 1994 elections were pure racial census outcomes, while Giliomee argued that owing to primordial attachments, few voters were open to political persuasion (Hermann Giliomee, “South Africa’s Emerging Dominant Party System,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 4 [1998]: 124–142). Reynolds and Lodge have both offered milder versions of the perspective in their works on elections in South Africa. See Andrew Reynolds, ed., Election ’94 South Africa: The

NOTES

43.

44.

45. 46.

195

First Open Election (New York: St. Martin’s, 1994) and Election ’99 South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki, and Tom Lodge, Consolidating Democracy: South Africa’s Second Popular Election (Johannesburg: Witswatersrand University Press, 1999). For a discussion of this dynamic and the limits to which it can be pushed, see Nicoli Nattrass and Jeremy Seekings, “ ‘Two Nations’? Race and Economic Inequality in South Africa Today,” Daedalus: Journal of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 130, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 45–69. Sampie Terreblanche, A History of Inequality in South Africa, 1652– 2002 (Pietermarizburg, South Africa: University of Natal Press, 2002), and Carolyn Jenkins and Lynne Thomas, “The Changing Nature of Inequality in South Africa,” Working Paper No. 203 (United Nations University World Institute for Development Economics Research [UNU/WIDER], October 2000). For a vignette of what these dynamics actually look like, see, “The Cape of Poverty,” Mail and Guardian Online, http://www.mg.co.za/ Content/13.asp?ap=14231 (accessed on May 16, 2003). Posner, “The Political Salience of Cultural Difference.” See the works of Suberu, especially “The Struggle for New States in Nigeria,” and “Federalism and Nigeria’s Political Future.” Larry Diamond, Class, Ethnicity and Democracy in Nigeria, and John Ayoade, “Ethnic Management in the 1979 Nigerian Constitution,” also discuss these dynamics.

4

Electoral Politics in South Africa, 1994–2004

1. For accounts of the transition, see the following: R. W. Johnson and Lawrence Schlemmer, Launching Democracy in South Africa: The First Open Election, April 1994 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996); Andrew Reynolds, ed. Election ’94 South Africa: The Campaigns, Results and Future Prospects (London: James Currey, Cape Town and Johannesburg: David Philip; New York: St Martin’s, 1994); Timothy Sisk, Democratization in South Africa: The Elusive Social Contract (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994); and Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country. 2. This is significant because a two-thirds majority enables the ruling party to unilaterally change the constitution. 3. Before the 2004 elections, the ANC decided that it would not announce candidates for the provincial premiers ahead of the elections. This was done both to prevent internal factionalism and to keep the electoral campaigns focused on the party and not individual candidates; this is discussed in detail in chapter 5. 4. These statements are based on the author’s interviews with multiple DP and DA campaign planners and MPs dating from 1997 through 2004.

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NOTES

5. Jessica Piombo, “The Results of Election 2004: Looking Back, Stepping Forward,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa: Assessing the First Democratic Decade, ed. Jessica Piombo and Lia Nijzink (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); James Hamill, “The Elephant and the Mice: Election 2004 and the Future of Opposition Politics in South Africa,” The Round Table 93, no. 377 (October 2004): 691–708. See also Anthony Lemon and Roddy Fox, “Consolidating South Africa’s New Democracy: Geographical Dimensions of Party Support in the 1999 Election,” Journal of Economic and Social Geography 91 no. 4 (2000): 89–100. 6. See Tom Lodge, “The African National Congress: There is No Party like It: Ayikho Efana Nayo,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa, and Tom Lodge, Politics in South Africa: From Mandela to Mbeki (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002). 7. Jeremy Seekings, The UDF: A History of the United Democratic Front in South Africa, 1983–1991 (Cape Town: David Philip; Oxford: James Currey; Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000). 8. Mamphela Ramphele, “Citizenship Challenges for South Africa’s Young Democracy,” Daedalus 130, no. 1 (Winter 2001): 1–17, especially 8, where Ramphele discusses a “hierarchy of privilege;” and Michael McDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 4 (Fall 2004): 629–656, especially 644. 9. Lodge, Politics in South Africa. 10. For an extended analysis of these dynamics, see Jessica Piombo, “Political Parties, Social Demographics and the Decline of Ethnic Mobilization in South Africa, 1994–1999,” Party Politics 11, no. 4 (July 2005): 447–470, and Jessica Piombo, Entrenching One-Party Dominance in South Africa: Political Institutions, Social Demographics and Party Strategies, 1994–1999, Ph.D. dissertation, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2003, http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/8029 (accessed on February 23, 2007). 11. Piombo, “Political Parties,” and Piombo, Entrenching One-Party Dominance. 12. The most notable statements by the NNP on this subject can be found in the debate in the National Assembly on the future of Afrikaners, held in February 1999. 13. These dynamics are discussed in detail in chapter 5. 14. Jeremy Michaels, “We Will Not Be Disbanding—NNP,” Cape Times April 26, 2004. In fact, demonstrating that they already knew the end was near, the NNP barely even staffed their monitoring booth at the IEC results center in Cape Town on election night (author’s observation). 15. This party existed only at the local level, as the parties were prevented from merging at the national and provincial levels by constitutional provisions that then existed against floor crossing in the national and

NOTES

16.

17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

197

provincial legislatures. See David Welsh, “Introduction,” in Tony Leon, Hope and Fear: Reflections of a Democrat (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 1998); David Welsh, “The Democratic Party,” in Election ’94 South Africa; and Susan Booysen, “The Democratic Alliance: Progress and Pitfalls,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa, ed. Piombo and Nijzink. Fox and Lemon, “Consolidating South Africa’s New Democracy,” 352. Also see Lodge, Consolidating Democracy, 172. Lodge writes that in most Indian areas in Gauteng, the DP was the ANC’s closest rival. See chapter 6 of this volume. The March–April 2003 defection window enabled sitting DP (and NNP) representatives at national and provincial levels to cross the floor to the DA, thus ending the existence of the DP. The series of opinion polls released by the Institute for Democracy in South Africa, the South African Broadcasting Corporation, and Markinor in 1999, called “Opinion ’99” revealed that most South Africans did not perceive the DP as inclusive, and little evidence since has disconfirmed this trend. Makhudu Sefara and Eleanor Momberg, “It’s Deal Time for Choosing SA’s Premiers,” Star (Johannesburg), April 19, 2004. Gavin Davis, “The Electoral Temptation of Race in South Africa: Implications for the 2004 Election,” Transformation 53 (2003): 4–28; Rod Alence, “South Africa after Apartheid: The First Decade,” Journal of Democracy 15, no. 3 (July 2004): 78–92.

5


1. For detailed histories of the ANC, see Saul Dubow, The African National Congress (Gloucestershire, UK: Sutton, 2000); Frances Meli, South Africa Belongs to Us: A History of the ANC (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). For comprehensive accounts of the 1994 to 1999 period, see Lodge, South African Politics; and Heribert Adam, Kogila Moodley, and Frederik Van Zyl Slabbert, Comrades in Business: Post-Liberation Politics in South Africa (Utrecht: International Books, 1998). The history presented in this section comes primarily from an integration of these sources. 2. See Seekings, The UDF. 3. Andrew Reynolds, “The Results,” Election ’94 South Africa. 4. Author interview with Andrew Reynolds, Cape Town, 1999. For a full account of this process, see R. W. Johnson’s gripping account of the 1994 election in KwaZulu-Natal, “The Election, the Count and the Drama in KwaZulu-Natal,” in Launching Democracy in South Africa. 5. See Lodge, South African Politics.

198

NOTES

6. Frost, “Preparing for Democracy,” 31. 7. See Lodge, South African Politics; and Pottie, “The First Five Years.” 8. Ahmed C. Bawa, “South Africa’s Young Democracy, Ten Years On: Guest Editor’s Introduction,” Social Research 17, no. 3 (Fall 2005): vii–xvii, xvi. 9. Deegan, The Politics of the New South Africa; UNDP, South Africa Human Development Report; Jeff Guy, “Somewhere Over the Rainbow: The Nation-State, Democracy and Race in a Globalizing South Africa,” Transformation 56 (2004): 68–89, 82. 10. McDonald, “The Political Economy of Identity Politics,” 631. 11. Sean Jacobs, Richard Calland, and Sipho Ngwema, “The Parliamentary Performance of South African Political Parties,” paper published by Idasa (Cape Town: Institute for Democracy in South Africa, September 1997). For a post-1997 analysis, see Lia Nijzink and Jessica Piombo, “The Institutions of Representative Democracy,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa, ed. Piombo and Nijzink. 12. Personal observation in Pretoria, South Africa, during February 1999. 13. Lodge, South African Politics, 7. 14. See Stephen Friedman, Building Tomorrow Today: African Workers in Trade Unions, 1970–1984 (Johannesburg: Ravan, 1987) for a review of the origins and early years of the alliance. For a discussion of the two strains of unionism that the formation of COSATU brought together, the role of unions in the liberation movement, and the formation of the alliance, see Martin Murray, The Revolution Deferred: The Painful Birth of Post-Apartheid South Africa (London: Verso, 1994). 15. See Lodge “The African National Congress,” and “The African National Congress: There Is No Party like It.” 16. McDonald, “Political Economy of Identity Politics.” 17. The political space to the left of the Tripartite Alliance was also closed, as extremely left-wing economic policies would alienate the international community whose investment South Africa desperately needed. See Susan Booysen, “Trends in Party Political Opposition Parties in South Africa—Ideological Constraints on Policy and Strategy,” Politeia 17, no. 2 (1998): 49. 18. African National Congress, “Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress as adopted at the 49th ANC National Conference,” discussion paper prepared for the 49th National Conference of the ANC, December 1994, http://www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/policy/ stratact.html (accessed on September 25, 2002). 19. Pallo Jordan, “The National Question in Post 1994 South Africa,” discussion paper prepared for the 50th ANC National Conference, December 1997, www.anc.org.za/ancdocs/discussion/natquestion. html (accessed on October 2, 2000).

NOTES

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20. “Strategy and Tactics of the African National Congress as adopted at the 49th ANC National Conference, December 1994,” http://www. anc.org.za/ancdocs/policy/stratact.html (accessed on September 30, 2002). HTML document; no page numbers available. 21. Ibid. 22. Jordan, “The National Question.” 23. Lodge, South African Politics. 24. Kaiser Nyatsumba, “Mandela: First among Equals,” Star (Johannesburg), March 2, 1999. 25. Quoted from Mandela’s address to the 50th National Conference of in December 1997, in Lynne Duke, “Mandela: Whites Fighting Reform,” Washington Post, December 17, 1997. 26. Ngonyama was commenting on news coverage of the ANC’s dismissal of its Northern Province premier Matthews Phosa in early 1999 (quoted in “Fighting Talk,” Sunday Independent, May 2, 1999). 27. Patrick Bulger, “Executive Slams ANC Indiscipline,” Star (Johannesburg), August 19, 1996; emphasis added. 28. Mondli Makhanya, “Death of Dissent within the ANC,” Star (Johannesburg), August 16, 1996. 29. Kaiser Nyatsumba, “First among Equals.” 30. ANC, “A Statement of the National Executive Committee of the ANC on the Occasion of the 86th Anniversary of the African National Congress,” statement issued by the ANC Department of Information and Publicity, Marshalltown, South Africa, January 8, 1998. 31. Max Sisulu, “Gloves Are Off in Parliament,” Mayibuye (March 1998). Sisulu was the ANC’s chief whip and a member of parliament at the time he wrote this article. 32. See, for example, the comments of Smuts Ngonyama, presidential spokesperson, in Pearl Sebolao, “Selection of Premiers Will Be Centralised,” Business Day (Johannesburg), March 24, 1999. 33. For example, COSATU president John Gomomo repeatedly claimed this as the ANC goal, as did Northern Province premier Mathole Motshega. See Sebolao, “Two-Thirds Majority Will Put ANC ‘Truly in Power,’ ” Business Day (Johannesburg), April 15, 1999; also reported in EISA, Election ’99 Update, no. 9 (March 26, 1999). 34. Lodge, “The African National Congress,” and “The African National Congress: There Is No Party like It.” 35. Ibid. 36. ANC, “People’s Manifesto for Change,” March 1999. 37. Author’s observations based on fieldwork in Cape Town, South Africa, in March and April 2004. These sentiments can also be found in the weekly online newspaper, ANC Today, during this time, especially the weekly letter by President Mbeki. See http://www.anc.org. za/ancdocs/anctoday/ (accessed on February 24, 2007), for the archives, which go back to the publication’s creation in 2001.

200

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38. The work of the Opinion ’99 consortium, which took regular opinion polls and published reports throughout 1998 and 1999, had documented the vast swings in public opinion about the ANC and its performance. The Opinion ’99 project had brought together the Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), South African polling firm Markinor, and the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC). Since then, the Afrobarometer (a joint initiative of the University of Cape Town and the University of Michigan), has taken over tracing these trends, though its focus is much less on South African electoral opinion than found in the work of the Opinion ’99 consortium. 39. EISA, Election ’99 Update no. 10 (April 16, 1999); Lodge, “The African National Congress.” 40. EISA Update no. 12 (May 14, 1999). The same day, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela made contradictory remarks at a May Day rally in Rustenburg. 41. Ebrahim Rasool, addressing an election meeting in Claremont, a primarily white suburb in the Western Cape (Chris Bateman, “Privileged Told to Deal with Insecurities,” Cape Times, May 26, 1999). 42. Citizen, March 10, 1999. 43. Daily Dispatch, May 29–31, 1999. 44. Shilowa to a community hall in the East Rand; Carol Paton, “ANC Blazes the Trail to Certain Victory,” Sunday Times (South Africa), May 30, 1999. 45. Roger Friedman, “Thabo Looks to Exorcise Some Ghosts in the Plain,” Cape Times, May 31, 1999. 46. Malcolm Ray, “DP Racist, Says Cronin,” Sowetan (Johannesburg), April 9, 1999. 47. Mbeki, speaking at an African Renaissance symposium in Durban (Ranjeni Munusamy and Carol Paton, “Get Angry about the Past, Says Mbeki,” Sunday Times (South Africa), March 28, 1999. 48. Farouk Chothia, “Mbeki Is All Ears on the Campaign Trail,” Business Day (Johannesburg), May 5, 1999. 49. Mbeki, speaking at an African Renaissance symposium in Durban (Munusamy and Paton, “Get Angry about the Past”). 50. Stephen Laufer, “ANC Drops Plan for Top Team on Campaign Trail,” Business Day (Johannesburg), April 16, 1999. 51. Paddy Harper, “Parties Use Negatives for a Positive Result,” Saturday Argus (Cape Town), May 12, 1999. 52. The breakaway of some ANC elements in November 2008 and the formation of a new party, the Congress of the People, may finally challenge this dominance. This volume went to press before the 2009 elections, however, so firm evidence is not yet available. These developments are discussed in the conclusion to this volume.

NOTES

201

6 The New National Party: Transforming into Irrelevance 1. The National Party changed its name to the New National Party (NNP) in late 1998. Because the name change occurred with a strategic shift in the party’s orientation, the difference between NP and NNP is significant. This work refers to the party as the National Party or NP until the point of the name change, after which the current name is used (New NP, NNP, and New National Party). When discussing the party over the entire ten-year period, it will be referred to as NNP, New NP, Nats or Nationalists. 2. See Sparks, Tomorrow Is Another Country for an account of these secret negotiations. 3. The interim constitution under which South Africa became democratic provided power-sharing mechanisms, creating the “Government of National Unity.” Parties winning eighty or more seats in the National Assembly could nominate an executive deputy president, and those earning over twenty seats were guaranteed membership in the cabinet. In 1994 the ANC, NP, and IFP earned cabinet positions. These powersharing arrangements were not retained in the final Constitution of 1996. See Robert Schrire, “The President and the Executive,” in South Africa: Designing New Political Institutions, ed. Murray Faure and JanErik Lane (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1996). 4. In the remaining province, KwaZulu-Natal, the NP came in third. See Willie Breytenbach, “The New National Party,” in Election ’99 South Africa, for a discussion of the rise and decline in the fortunes of the NNP between 1994 and 1999. 5. Reynolds, “The Results,” in Election ’94 South Africa, 192. 6. Chris Louw, “No Identity Crisis, Claims Relaxed FW,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), August 5, 1994; Derek Fleming, “Ministers in Nat Power Struggle,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), December 6, 1995. 7. Personal conflicts undoubtedly played a role in this move: Kriel and Meyer had been feuding since at least 1994, as they had opposite views for the best party strategy and the two were competing to be the successor to F. W. de Klerk upon his retirement. See Marion Edmunds, “Nats Keeping the Battle Plan Secret,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), October 6, 1995. 8. See Dirk Kotzé, “NP Punts for a New Power Base,” Star (Johannesburg), February 16, 1996, and Anthony Johnson, “Meyer Needs Two Small Miracles,” Cape Times, February 28, 1996. Unlike most ChristianDemocratic parties, the NP’s affiliation was with the Afrikaner DutchReformed Church, a Protestant denomination. 9. Gauteng NP leader Olaus van Zyl quoted in “NP Pledges ‘Vibrant’ Opposition in Gauteng,” Citizen (South Africa) July 31, 1996.

202

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10. Breytenbach, “The New National Party,” 118. 11. For example, in November 1995 the provincial minister of local government in the Western Cape, Peter Marais, stated, “Our party is too White . . . .Our packaging is still too White,” (Barry Streek, “NP ‘White’ Image under Fire,” Cape Times, November 20, 1995). Marais was one of the most prominent Coloured leaders in the NP. See also “Dilemma of a ‘Too White NP,’ ” editorial in Cape Times, November 21, 1995; and “NP Policy Body 80% White,” Cape Times, June 21, 1996. 12. Patrick McKenzie, “NP Aims to Base Its Politics on Shared Values,” Cape Times, October 2, 1996. 13. See Adrian Hadland, “NP’s New Vision Gets a Skeptical Response,” Sunday Weekend Argus (Cape Town), February 17–18, 1996; Hennie Serfontein, “Future Looks Black for Nationalists,” Cape Times, July 16, 1996; and Mark Gevisser, “This Boereseun’s a Smooth Operator,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), February 9, 1995. 14. Mavuso was an ex-ANC executive member; McKenzie was the member of Executive Council (MEC) for Police in the Western Cape; and David Malatsi was appointed one of the party’s senators from Mpumalanga, one of the two deputy secretaries-general appointed in 1996, and later on was selected as the leader of the Mpumalanga NP. 15. Patrick Bulger, “NP Must Beware of Landing Up on the Ocean Floor,” Star (Johannesburg), March 5, 1996. 16. The departures included Deputy Land Affairs Minister Tobie Meyer (brother of Roelf Meyer), NP Minister of Welfare and Population Development Abe Williams, Bhadra Ranchod, deputy speaker of the National Assembly and one of the party’s most senior nonwhite members, former deputy minister Wynand Breytenbach, finance committee member Francois Jacobsz, Senator Sathie Naidoo, Pik Botha, Leon Wessels, and Chris Fismer. Naidoo was expelled for offences including “insufficient devotion to party duty.” See Clive Sawyer, “Nats Still Wrestling with an Identity Crisis,” Cape Argus (Cape Town), December 10, 1996; and Serfontein, “Future Looks Black for Nationalists.” 17. As the Truth and Reconciliation Commission undertook hearings throughout the country, the disclosures made had hurt the party’s standings among many whites who had not realized the extent of apartheid-era atrocities. One senior Nat leader described the workings of Truth Commission as being “like a taxpayer-funded inquisition into the National party,” (Sawyer, “Nats Still Wrestling”). 18. Anthony Johnson, “Moment of Truth Gives NP Cold Feet,” Cape Times, May 7, 1997. 19. Interview by author with Lawrence Solomon, NNP organizer on June 10, 1997, in Cape Town (Berg Street headquarters). 20. Interview with Solomon (1997). Similar views were expressed by Ms. Khan, NNP local councilor in Heideveld during an interview with the author on May 11, 1999 at the National Party Offices on

NOTES

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

29.

203

Berg Street, Cape Town and by Edwin Conroy, Gauteng provincial manager and executive secretary of the Provincial Party, (author interview) on March 31, 1999 at the NNP National Headquarters, Hornkloof, Pretoria. Solomon and the others interviewed cited pressures from below that also motivated the decision; these decisions were based more on emotional connections rather than the careerdriven calculations of the party elites. Conservative Afrikaners in the party considered the National Party to be the party of Afrikaners in the past and the future, while Coloured supporters opposed the name because they felt that they had sacrificed and been ridiculed for their actions. If the party changed its name it would be a different entity altogether, and not the organization for which they had risked so much. Fleming, “Ministers in Nat Power Struggle.” On Meyer’s resignation, see Marion Edmunds, “How Roelf Broke the Rules,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), May 9, 1997. The other resignations included the entire Gauteng Youth Action leadership, who took with them youth leaders from two of Pretoria’s previously most staunchly pro-NP universities: Rand Afrikaans University and Pretoria University (“Youth Split Spells Problem for NP,” Weekly Mail and Guardian). Within a week of Meyer’s resignation, David Chuenyane, a senior black member in the NP, called for senior Nat leaders to resign because they had failed to appoint blacks to decision-making positions. In Gauteng alone, Chuenyane contended, all party councilors and provincial legislators were white, Coloured, or Indian; Africans were left out of the party (“New Rift as Black Nats Fall Out and Youth Chief Quits,” Cape Argus, May 21, 1997; and “Top Nats Should Go–Party MP: ‘NP Leadership Gives Blacks Cold Shoulder,’ ” Cape Times, May 20, 1997). Howard Barrell, “NNP’s Last Days in Cloud-Cuckoo Land,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), January 29–February 4, 1999. Sawyer, “Nats Still Wrestling with an Identity Crisis,” and Breytenbach, “The New National Party,” 119–120. Local elections in South Africa are held on both a proportional and constituency basis, with half the seats contested on party lists and half in first-past-the-post single member constituencies. By-elections are held when a politician vacates a constituency seat. Mukoni T. Ratshitanga, “White SA Shuns the Nats,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), May 15, 1998. Ibid. Comments of federal council member and MP Sheila Camerer, in Ratshitanga, “White SA Shuns the Nats.” See also Donald McNeil, Jr., “Apartheid’s Architects Losing White Votes in South Africa,” New York Times, May 17, 1998. Chiara Carter, “Cape Nats in Disarray,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), March 5–11, 1999.

204

NOTES

30. EISA, Election ’99 Update, no. 6 (February 17, 1999). 31. EISA, Update no. 8 (March 12, 1999). 32. Howard Barrell, “NNP Voter Support ‘Collapsing,’ ” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), April 9–15, 1999. 33. During the registration period, several parties contested the ANC’s decision to accept only a certain form of identity documents for voter registration. Opinion poll evidence in November 1998 indicated that the supporters of the NNP and DP were least likely to possess the correct documents, and therefore the requirement had the potential to disenfranchise large sections of these parties’ supporters. In the end, the ANC did not change the requirement, but the controversy held up the elections process for some time. See Lodge, Consolidating Democracy; Patrick Laurence, “The Fight for a Free and Fair Ballot,” Financial Mail (South Africa), February 5, 1999; and Laurence, “One in Five Lack Proper IDs to Vote,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), November 10, 1998. 34. This was the order in which van Schalkwyk introduced the topics during his speech launching the election manifesto to the Federal Congress in March 1999. 35. Personal observation, as well as reported in EISA, Update no. 8 (March 12, 1999). 36. Marthinus van Schalkwyk, speech at Manifesto Launch, March 1999; personal observation. 37. Robert Mattes, Helen Taylor, and Cherrel Africa, “The Public Agenda,” Opinion ’99 Press Release, January 1999. Respondents were asked an open-ended question, “What is the most important problem that the government ought to address?” They were then asked for their second and third choices. These figures represent a compellation of the three choices. The most important problems for Coloureds and Indians were not reported. See also, Robert Mattes, Helen Taylor, and Cherrel Africa, “Public Opinion and Voter Preference, 1994–1999,” in Election 99 South Africa. 38. Cheryl Hendricks, “On the Campaign Trail in the Western Cape,” Election Update 2004 South Africa no. 6 (April 12, 2004): 23–25, 24. 39. Donwald Pressly, “Nats May Be in Decline but They Are Singing,” The Electronic Mail and Guardian, http://www.mg.co.za/Content/ l3.asp?ao=33443 (accessed on April 2, 2004). 40. Marthinus van Schalkwyk, speaking in Stellenbosch, quoted in Ilse Arendse, “ ‘NNP Has Voice within Government’,” News24, March 27, 2004, http://www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/News/ 0,6119,2–7-1442_1504434,00.html (accessed on April 4, 2004). 41. Bonny Schoonakker, “Van Schalkwyk Gets Fired Up for Election Battle,” Sunday Times (South Africa), February 29, 2004, http:// w w w.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/29/politics/politics03.asp (accessed on March 5, 2004).

NOTES

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42. Cheryl Hendricks, “Western Cape: A Vote for Tradition, Personalities or Issues?” Election Update 2004 (Johannesburg: Electoral Institute of South Africa) no 2, (February 16, 2004): 33–35, 33. 43. Schoonakker, “Van Schalkwyk Gets Fired Up.” 44. Personal observation in 1999 and 2004. For specific examples from 2004, see Cheryl Hendricks, “On the Campaign Trail in the Western Cape.” 45. “ANC-NNP Coalition is Here to Stay,” This Day, February 16, 2004.

7 From Democratic Party to Democratic Alliance: Mobilizing Minority Power? 1. In the floor-crossing window in March–April 2003, the national and provincial wings of the Democratic Party dissolved and renamed themselves the Democratic Alliance (DA). The DA had existed at local levels since municipal elections in 2001. For consistency’s sake when referring to the entire 1994–2004 period, I call the party the DA. Discussions of the party before the name change use the old name, DP. 2. This was a common theme among interviewees throughout the 1999 and 2004 campaign seasons. 3. Welsh, “The Democratic Party.” 4. Ibid., 108. 5. Kotzé, “The Potential Constituencies of the Democratic Alliance: What Dowries Do the DP and the NNP Bring to the Marriage?” paper prepared for presentation at the conference “Opposition in South Africa’s New Democracy,” Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, June 28–30, 2000. 6. Lodge, Consolidating Democracy, 110; Welsh, “The Democratic Party.” 7. Lodge, Consolidating Democracy, 111; Welsh “The Democratic Party.” Welsh was quoting a DP strategy document released in 1993: Invest DP for Power and Peace. 8. Welsh, “The Democratic Party,” Lodge, Consolidating Democracy, 111. Welsh was again quoting the 1993 strategy document. 9. On the provincial ballot the DP picked up about 500,000 more votes (overall when votes are pooled from all the provinces) than on the national ballot. 10. R. W. Johnson, “The 1994 Election: Outcome and Analysis,” 308. 11. Reynolds, “The Results,” in Election ’94 South Africa, 197–198. 12. Ibid. 13. Welsh, “The Democratic Party,” and Reynolds, “The Results,” in Election ’94 South Africa, 198. 14. Richard Calland, ed., The First Five Years: A Review of South Africa’s Democratic Parliament (Cape Town: Institute for Democracy in

206

15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25. 26.

27.

28.

29.

NOTES

South Africa, 1999); Jacobs, Calland, and Ngwema, “Parliamentary Performance.” Interview by author with a DP MP in Cape Town, June 1997; name withheld on request. Gaye Davis, “ ‘New’ DP Will Still Snap at the Government’s Heels,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), November 8, 1996. Ibid. For an in-depth discussion of the strategic shift in the DP, see Paul Bell and Charlene Smith, “Little Landslides, Seismic Shocks,” Leadership 16, no. 4 (October–November 1997). Jacobs, Calland, and Ngwema, “Parliamentary Performance.” Lia Nijzink, “Parliamentary Procedures and Party Strategies: The Scope for Opposition in the New South African Parliament,” paper prepared for presentation at the conference “Opposition in South Africa’s New Democracy,” Rhodes University, Grahamstown, South Africa, June 28—30, 2000, 10. Nijzink notes that the ANC, in a postelection assessment, conceded that the DP’s effective use of question time “might have” contributed to its electoral success. Sean Jacobs, “DP Draws on Past Experience,” Parliamentary Whip, October 6, 1997. Howard Barrell, “Dear Lord, Have Mercy on Kortbroek,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), August 7, 1998, www.mg.co.za/ mg/news/98aug1/7aug-np.html (accessed on November 15, 1999). Bell and Smith, “Little Landslides, Seismic Shocks.” Ratshitanga, “White SA Shuns the Nats;” and McNeil, “Apartheid’s Architects.” Barrell, “NNP Voter Support ‘Collapsing.’ ” Welsh, “The Democratic Party.” See Howard Barrell, “DP Attempts to Take Centre Stage,” Weekly Mail and Guardian (South Africa), September 18, 1999, web.sn.apc.org/ mail/issues/980918/NEWS119.html (accessed on May 19, 1999). Chiara Carter, “Key Western Cape Nats Seek New Political Home,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), December 18, 1998, web.sn.apc.org/wmail/issues/981218/NEWS23.html (accessed on May 19, 1999); and “Cape Nats in Disarray.” Notable among these defectors were national MP Glen Carelse, WC (Western Cape) politician Antoinette Versfeld (who commanded support in the West Coast, an area north of Cape Town heavily made up of Coloured working-class communities), provincial economics committee chair Charles Redcliffe, and Henry and Pauline Cupido, prominent Coloured politicians in the Western Cape. Charlene Smith, “Let’s Shut the Shop, Says Nat as He Quits,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), May 22, 1998, www. mg.co.za/mg/news/98may2/22may-nats.html (accessed on July 20, 1999). “Interview: Tony Leon,” Focus (A Journal of the Suzman Foundation), July 1998, www.hsf.org.za/Focus_11/f11-leon.html.

NOTES

207

30. For detailed accounts of the DP’s 1999 election campaign, see Welsh, “The Democratic Party,” and Lodge, Consolidating Democracy. On the 2004 campaign, see Booysen, “The Democratic Alliance: Progress and Pitfalls,” and the election updates produced by the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa, www.eisa.co.za). EISA produced bimonthly election updates in advance of both the 1999 and 2004 elections; these contain detailed information on election campaigns within each province and on the national tier. Since the goal of this chapter is to illustrate the way that institutions and demographics shaped party choices, this chapter will not provide a full account of the election campaign. 31. Democratic Party of South Africa, “The Guts to Fight Back: Candidate’s Handbook, Election Campaign 1999,” The Democratic Party of South Africa, 1999, 3; emphasis in original. 32. Interview with Lynn Ploos van Amstel (Durban, April 22, 1999). 33. Interview with van Amstel. 34. Leon, media briefing reported by Malcolm Ray on April 7, 1999. 35. Interview with Mannie de Freitas (Johannesburg, March 9, 1999). 36. Davis, “The Electoral Temptation of Race in South Africa;” Hendricks, “On the Campaign Trail in the Western Cape,” 25. 37. Davis, “The Electoral Temptation of Race,” 13. 38. Suthentira Govender, “Indian Candidates Well Placed on DA Lists,” Sunday Times (South Africa), February 8, 2004, http:// www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/02/08/news/durban/ndbn07.asp (accessed on February 10, 2004). 39. Booysen, “The Democratic Alliance.” According to then DA strategist Ryan Coetzee, the party spent 30 percent of its election budget on advertising in print and on radio (Xolisa Vapi, “Different Strokes for Politicking Folk,” Sunday Times [South Africa], April 4, 2004, http://www.sundaytimes.co.za/2004/04/04/politics/politics06.asp [accessed on April 4, 2004]). 40. Paddy Harper, “Scent of Blood in Air as Opposition Gears Up,” Sunday Independent, April 4, 2004, http://www.iol.co.za/index. php?sf=6&click_id=13&art_id=ct20040404105602829L500322& set_id=1 (accessed on April 4, 2004). 41. S’Thembiso Msomi, “DA’s Quest for Black Votes,” Sunday Times (South Africa), February 15, 2004, http://www.sundaytimes.co. za/2004/02/15/politics/politics02.asp (accessed on February 20, 2004); and Govender, “Indian Candidates Well Placed on DA Lists.” 42. Hendricks, “On the Campaign Trail in the Western Cape,” 25. 43. Booysen, “The Democratic Alliance,” 131. 44. Hendricks, “On the Campaign Trail in the Western Cape,” 25. 45. See, for example, “Mbeki Must Say about 3rd Term,” News24, January 30, 2004, http://www.news24.com/News24/South_ Africa/Politics/0,6119,2–7-12_1476656,00.html (accessed on February 10, 2004).

208

NOTES

46. SAPA, “Van Schalkwyk Is a Loser, Says Leon,” (April 1, 2004), ht t p://w w w. iol.co.z a/ i ndex.php?sf= 6 & c l ic k _ id=13& a r t _ id=qw1080833761964B242&set_id=1 (accessed on April 5, 2004.) According to the article, “Leon told supporters at the Kimberly city hall that Van Schalkwyk was the ‘most dishonourable figure in South African politics.’ ” “ ‘Somehow, I think Marthinus van Schalkwyk is nearing the end of his political career. He is not a leader; he is a loser,’ Leon said.” 47. Harper, “Scent of Blood in the Air.” 48. Jeremy Michaels, “Phoenix Poster War Could Win Indian Vote,” Daily News, March 1, 2004, 3, http://www.iol.co.za/index.php?sf=6&click_ id=13&art_id=vn20040301165239121C532503&set_id=1 (accessed on March 2, 2004); the quote is from SAPA, “NNP Complains to IEC about DA Advert,” (March 2, 2004) http://www.iol.co.za/index. php?click_id=13&art_id=qw107824014176B242&set_id=1 (accessed on March 4, 2004). 49. Booysen, “The Democratic Alliance.” See also Jessica Piombo, “The Results of Election 2004,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa.

8 The Inkatha Freedom Party: Turning away from Ethnic Power 1. History and Profile of the Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), www.ifp.org. za/ (accessed on June 20, 1999); date and author unknown. 2. Linda Wertheimer, “Inkatha Originally Organized to Preserve ANC Principles,” All Things Considered, radio interview with Mervyn Frost (professor of politics of the University of Natal, Durban) National Public Radio, April 19, 1994. 3. History and Profile. Literally, ubhoko is the sharpened fighting stick that is part of traditional Zulu male armor. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid. 6. See Paul Taylor, “South Africa’s Right, ANC Move to End Rifts, Other Steps Lessen Likelihood of Election Boycott,” Washington Post, March 4, 1994. 7. In 1994, the Independent Electoral Commission estimated that there were 165 “no-go” zones in the country, and that 70 of them were located in KwaZulu-Natal. IEC, Report of the Independent Electoral Commission: The South African Elections of April 1994 (Johannesburg, October 1994), 53. See also Lodge, Consolidating Democracy, 6–7. 8. See William Clairborne, “Inkatha Party Scrambles to Mount LastMinute Campaign in South Africa,” Washington Post, April 21, 1994. 9. See Gerhard Mare and Christina Hamilton, “The Inkatha Freedom Party,” in Election ’94 South Africa; Johnson and Schlemmer,

NOTES

10.

11. 12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24. 25.

209

Launching Democracy in South Africa; Laurence Piper, “Democracy for a Bargain: The 1999 Election in KwaZulu-Natal,” Politikon 26, no. 2 (1999): 145–154. Tom Lodge noted that the IEC vehemently denied that the outcome of the 1994 election in KZN had been determined through bargaining, but he also noted that the discrepancies between the number of votes reported to have been cast on the provincial and national ballots from KZN shed doubt on the veracity of the IEC’s denial (Consolidating Democracy, 12). Bill Keller, “Zulu King Breaks Ties to Buthelezi,” New York Times, September 21, 1994; and Paul Taylor, “The Politics of Brinkmanship: Buthelezi in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” Washington Post, March 22, 1995. Donwald Pressly, “Democratise to Survive?” Cape Times, August 2, 1996. For example, the IFP polled 69,735 votes in Durban, compared to the ANC’s 262,927 (Justice Malala, “IFP May Have Votes, but ANC Has Purse Strings,” Star (Johannesburg), July 5, 1996). Comments of IFP MEC Peter Miller, quoted in Steve Mathewson, “ANC Steals March on IFP in KwaZulu Poll,” Saturday Star (Johannesburg), June 29, 1996. For an extended discussion of political cleavages along class lines within KwaZulu-Natal, see Jung, Then I Was Black. See “Time for a Major IFP Makeover,” Star (Johannesburg), July 24, 1996. Malala, “IFP May Have Votes.” “Buthelezi a Hit in Shabalala Territory,” Mercury (Durban/KwaZuluNatal), April 21, 1997. Quoted in Jovial Rantao, “Boost Provincial Powers, Urges Buthelezi,” Star (Johannesburg), June 18, 1997. Malala, “IFP May Have Votes.” See Sabelo Ndlangisa, “Ruling Party Unleashes Its Princess,” Sunday Times (South Africa), March 28, 2004, http://www.sundaytimes.co. za/2004/03/28/politics/politics03.asp (accessed on April 2, 2004). Comments of IFP party caucus chief Ben Skosana, quoted in Jacobs, Calland, and Ngwema, “ Parliamentary Performance,” 12. Jacobs, Calland, and Ngwema, “Parliamentary Performance,” 11. In 1996, when trying to woo DP and PAC leaders into closer cooperation with the ANC by offering them cabinet positions, Mandela had reportedly referenced the Zimbabwean situation as a model South Africa should consider following (J. E. Spence, “Opposition in South Africa,” Government and Opposition 32, no. 4 [Autumn 1997]: 522–541, 537). Mondli Makhanya, “IFP Chooses to Stay with GNU,” Star, June 5, 1996. Justice Malala, “IFP Conference to Review Party’s Position on GNU,” Star (Johannesburg), July 4, 1996.

210

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26. Makhanya, “IFP Chooses to Stay.” 27. See Laurence Piper, “The Inkatha Freedom Party: Between the Impossible and the Ineffective,” in Electoral Politics in South Africa, 148–165. 28. For more on the internal power struggles, see Kaiser Nyatsumba, “Whichever Way You Slice It, the IFP Faces a Crisis,” Cape Argus, January 30, 1997; Nyatsumba, “Fear of Racial Split Might Be behind Cabinet Carrot,” Saturday Star (Johannesburg), February 1, 1997; and Nyatsumba, “Inkatha Leaders Move to Quell Party Crisis Fears,” Cape Argus, January 28, 1997. 29. See “Hardliners Tighten the Reins at IFP Indaba,” Cape Times, July 29, 1996. 30. “Buthelezi Lashes Out at IFP Mavericks and the ANC,” Star (Johannesburg), December 30, 1996. 31. Nyatsumba, “Whichever Way You Slice It,” and Mondli Makhanya, “In Buthelezi’s Kingdom, He Reigns On, Untrammeled and Unchallenged,” Star (Johannesburg), August 2, 1996. 32. Mare and Hamilton, “The Inkatha Freedom Party,” in Election ’99 South Africa, 104. 33. Interview by author with P. Smith. 34. Piper, “Democracy for a Bargain,” 149. 35. Reynolds, “The Results,” in Election ’99 South Africa. 36. Laurence Piper, “Inkatha Freedom Party.” 37. Ibid., 154–155 and author’s interview with Gavin Woods, IFP MP in Cape Town on May 7, 1999. 38. Author interviews with Inkosi B. N. Mdletshe, speaker of the KwaZulu-Natal Legislature in Durban on April 15, 1999; the latter in an interview with Dr. Rubnai, IFP researcher, at the IFP Regional Office in Durban on April 15, 1999 and the compiled reports of the Electoral Institute of Southern Africa for the 2004 election campaign, www.eisa.org.za/. 39. Piper, “Democracy for a Bargain,” 149, emphasis added. 40. Interview with Basil Douglas, Constance Zikalala (Head of the IFP Women’s Brigade, in the IFP Gauteng Regional Offices, Central Johannesburg, on March 10, 1999) and Finbar Dunne (IFP Gauteng treasurer, in the IFP Gauteng Regional Offices, Central Johannesburg, on March 10, 1999); comments of IFP secretary general in the Northern Cape, Margaret Arnolds (reported in Tara Turkington, “Flocking to the IFP in Northern Cape,” Sunday World, March 28, 1999). 41. Interview with Gavin Woods, IFP MP in Cape Town on May 7, 1999. Woods noted that the Western Cape Party barely had any support on the ground and practically no funding to run the provincial campaign. 42. Interview with A. Smith. 43. Interview with Basil Douglas, Gauteng IFP Campaign Manager, in Johannesburg on March 10, 1999.

NOTES

211

44. Comments in Buthelezi’s speech at the launch of the IFP’s national election in Soweto. Information based both on personal observation and Primarashni Pillay, “IFP, AZAPO Launch Poll Campaign,” Business Day (Johannesburg), March 15, 1999. 45. For an example of this, see Ilaine Harper, “IFP Slams Third Term for Mbeki,” News24, February 9, 2004, http://www.news24.com/ News24/South_ A frica/ Politics/0,2–7-12_1481126,00.html (accessed on February 10, 2004). 46. These were the main themes of Buthelezi’s address to the Freedom Day rally held at Kings Park stadium in Durban on April 27, 1999. Information from both personal observation as well as Jovial Rantao, “Recognise KwaZulu-Natal as a Monarchy—Buthelezi,” Star (Johannesburg), April 28, 1999. 47. “ANC ‘Disastrous’ for Chiefs,” News24, April 10, 2004, http:// www.news24.com/News24/South_Africa/Elections2004/0,2–71557_1510721,00.html (accessed on April 13, 2004). 48. Piper, “Democracy for a Bargain,” 146–147. 49. Piper, “Inkatha Freedom Party,” 149. 50. Quoted in Piper, “Inkatha Freedom Party,” 154.

9

Conclusion: The Contingent Nature of Political Mobilization

1. Anthony Butler, “South Africa’s Political Futures: The Positive and Negative Implications of One-Party Dominance,” paper presented at the Electoral institute of Southern Africa, EISA Democracy Seminar Series, August 7, 2002. 2. Hermann Giliomee and Charles Simkins, eds., The Awkward Embrace: One Party-Domination and Democracy (Cape Town: Tafelberg, 1999). 3. Alence, “South Africa after Apartheid.” 4. See, for example, “Zuma Faces ANC Rebellion,” Electronic Mail and Guardian (South Africa), September 26, 2008, http://www.mg. co.za/article/2008–09-26-zuma-faces-anc-rebellion (accessed on September 26, 2008). 5. At the time of Mbeki’s resignation, his allies launched a Web site called “Friends of Democracy,” to protest the abuse of power by the ANC and gauge the mood of South Africans on the issue. http:// www.friendsofdemocracy.co.za/ (accessed September 30, 2008). 6. For the personal side of the rivalry, see Mark Gevisser’s biography of Mbeki, Thabo Mbeki: The Dream Deferred (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball, 2007). 7. See Katharine McKenzie, “The ANC’s Polokwane Conference: Dangers and Opportunities,” Center for Strategic and International Studies (December 10, 2007), http://forums.csis.org/africa/?p=77

212

NOTES

8.

9.

10. 11.

12. 13.

14.

15. 16.

17.

(accessed on January 19, 2007), for a preconference analysis of these factions. See also Ruaridh Nicoll, “Fight Begins for the Soul of SA,” Mail and Guardian (South Africa), November 25, 2007, http:// www.mg.co.za/articlePage.aspx?articleid=325916&area=/breaking_ news/breaking_news__national/ (accessed on November 25, 2007). Such changes were in fact proposed in 2003 after a lengthy government-initiated inquiry into electoral reform, but the ANC promptly rejected the proposals. See An Electoral System for South Africa: Various Options, Report of the Electoral Task Team, January 2003, at the Web site of the IEC: www.elections.org.za/papers/27/ETT. pdf (accessed on September 30, 2008). The informal settlements in Hout Bay and Khayelitsha, which had experienced devastating fires just months ahead of the elections, are good examples of areas on which the IEC kept close watch for electoral violence by those dispossessed when their identity documents were destroyed. Author interview with Courtney Sampson, provincial electoral officer of the Western Cape, on April 8, 2004. Piombo, “The Results of Election 2004,” 253. These figures were calculated from IEC registration and turnout figures, and compared with census estimates of the population. Michael Bratton, “Second Elections in Africa,” Journal of Democracy 9, no. 3 (1998): 51–66. Pippa Norris, Democratic Phoenix: Reinventing Political Activism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). Norris found that that most countries at South Africa’s level of economic development and length of democratic rule tend to demonstrate turnout rates averaging in the 70 percent range of VAP. This is for all democracies; dominant party democracies, a category into which South Africa undeniably fits, record average turnout rates of 57 percent. This in itself is not necessarily a new insight, but bears repeating, given the continued insistence in many writings that the politicization of ethnic identities is inevitable within a PR electoral system. The reverse of the South African case can be found in India, where a multitude of strong states have worked against the consolidation pressures of a first-past-the-post electoral system to generate a political party system with a multitude of political parties, both ethnic and nonethnic, many of which exist on a solely regional basis. Bodine, “Reaping the Whirlwind.” See Karen Guttieri and Jessica Piombo, eds., Interim Governments: Institutional Bridges to Peace and Democracy? (Washington, DC: United States Institute of Peace Press, 2007). Cf. Carrie L. Manning, “Interim Governments and the Construction of Political Elites,” and Michael S. Malley, “Inchoate Opposition, Divided Incumbents,” both chapters in Interim Governments: Institutional Bridges to Peace and Democracy?

NOTES

213

18. Devon Curtis’ work on Burundi and the DRC offers great insight into the pros and cons of including such parties in peace agreements. Devon Curtis, “Transitional Governance in Burundi and the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” in Interim Governments: Institutional Bridges to Peace and Democracy? 19. See the collected works in Thomas Bruneau and Harold Trinkunas, eds., Global Politics of Defense Reform (New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 20. Mark Shaw, “Crime, Police and Public in Transitional Societies,” Transformation 49 (2002): 1–24.


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Julie Killian. National Media Director, on March 29, 1999 at the NNP National Head Offices, Hornkloof, Pretoria. Johan Durante. Pretoria Region Manager, at NNP Provincial Offices, Hornkloof, Pretoria, March 29, 1999. Edwin Conroy. Gauteng Provincial Manager and Executive Secretary of the Provincial Party, on March 31, 1999 at the NNP National Headquarters, Hornkloof, Pretoria. Chris van der Berg. Chief Secretary of the Provincial NNP in KZN, on April 5,1999 at the NNP Provincial Offices, East Durban. Tommy Immelman. CEO and Secretary in Chief of the NNP in the Western Cape, on May 5, 1999 at the NNP Provincial Headquarters building on Berg Street, Cape Town. Councillor Khan. Manager of the Heideveld Branch, on May 11, 1999 at the NNP building on Berg Street, Cape Town. Freddie Abrahams. Central Region Organizer for Tygerberg Region (Regional Secretary for Central and Southern Cape, including Athlone, Mannenberg, Overport, Gugulethu and Claremont) on May 11, 1999 at the NNP Headquarters building on Berg Street, Cape Town. Freddie Abrahams. May 18, 1999 in the town of Atlantis at a municipal by-election. Lizo Bengu. District Chairman in Khayelitsha, on May 11, 1999 at the NNP Headquarters building on Berg Street, Cape Town. Lawrence Solomon. Regional Organizer in the Western Cape, on June 10, 1997 at the NNP Headquarters building on Berg Street, Cape Town.

Inkatha Freedom Party John Aulsebrook. Chair of the Durban Metro Election Committee, Chairman of the Premier’s Committee in the KZN Legislature. Friday, April 23, 1999, Durban Club Headquarters. Basil Douglas. Gauteng IFP Campaign Manager, IFP Gauteng Regional Offices, Central Johannesburg, March 10, 1999. Dr. Rubnai. IFP Researcher. Thursday, April 15, 1999. IFP Regional Office in Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Finbar Dunne. IFP Gauteng Treasurer. IFP Gauteng Regional Offices, Central Johannesburg, March 10, 1999. Inkosi B. N. Mdletshe. Speaker of the KZN legislature, Thursday, April 15, 1999. National Office, Durban Club Place, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Johan Ngcobo. National Campaign Director; Thursday, April 15, 1999. National Office, Durban Club Place, Durban, KwaZulu-Natal. Andrew Smith. Communications Director. Durban Central Offices, Durban Club Building, April 21, 1999. Peter Smith. IFP Communications Directorate, Assistant Campaign Manager and Deputy National Spokesperson, Durban Club Offices, National Headquarters, April 19, 1999.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

245

Gavin Woods. IFP MP. Parliament, Cape Town, May 7, 1999. Constance Zikalala. Head of IFP Women’s Brigade, IFP Gauteng Regional Offices, Central Johannesburg, March 10, 1999.

Democratic Party Manny de Freitas. DP Organizer for Gauteng South. Telephone interview, February 26, 1999. Manny de Freitas. DP Regional Office in Mountainview, Johannesburg, March 9, 1999. Danie Erasmus. DP Pretoria Campaign Coordinator, North Gauteng, April 1, 1999. Gareth Morgan. DP KwaZulu-Natal Provincial Media Officer; Westville, KwaZulu-Natal, April 20, 1999. Omie Singh. Manager of the Phoenix Branch of the DP. Westville, KwaZuluNatal, April 22, 1999. Lynn Ploos van Amstel. DP Regional Chair for KwaZulu-Natal Coastal Region. Westville, KwaZulu-Natal, April 22, 1999. Belinda Barrett. DP Head of Durban Central Election Office; Berea, KwaZulu-Natal, April 26, 1999. Roger Burrows. DP MP, Head of Provincial DP. Berea, KwaZulu-Natal, April 28, 1999. James Selfe. Member of DP National Executive and Campaign Coordinator for the Western Cape. Cape Town, May 8, 1999.


Index

Entries in italics refer to charts and tables. affirmative action, 53, 86, 113, 117, 123, 137 African Christian Democratic Party (ACDP), 45, 60, 67, 75–76, 172 Africanism, 89 African National Congress (ANC), 79–101, 165 background of, under apartheid, 16, 64, 79–82 banning and exile of, 80–81, 145 ban on, lifted, 81, 105, 174 black empowerment and, 69 centralized power and, 46, 70, 84–85 constitutional negotiations and, 38–40, 106, 191 n2 crime and, 118 dominant position of, and influence on party politics, 18, 33, 64–66, 68–71, 77, 82, 169 DP/DA and, 74, 114, 125, 127–30, 134, 135–41, 209 n23 elections of 1994 and, 81–82, 91, 146–47 elections of 1999 and, 95–99, 116, 150 elections of 2004 and, 63–64, 95–98, 150 electoral strength of, 16, 47, 101 ethnic divisions within, not exploited by opposition, 34

federal system resisted by, 43–44 first decade of democracy and, 1 GNU and, 72–73, 106–8, 152–53, 201 n3 Harare Declaration and, 191 n2 IFP and, 143–54, 158 Interim Constitution and, 127 internal tensions and, 68–70, 81, 84, 93–94, 169–71, 175, 193 n22, 200 n52, 211 n5 KZN and, 150, 153, 160, 161, 209 n10 National Conference (52nd, Polokwane, 2007), 170–71 National Executive Committee (NEC), 84, 93–94, 170–71 NNP/NP and, 72–73, 103–8, 110–11, 114, 116–20, 122–23, 127, 140, 187 n39 opinion polls on, 200 n38 opposition parties challenge, at national level, 18, 60–61 PAC and, 209 n23 party discipline and, 46, 71, 100 party system vibrancy stifled by dominance of, 169, 171, 173–74 patronage and, 85–87 political discourse of, and blackwhite vs. ethnic differences, 70–71, 100–1

248

INDEX

African National Congress (ANC)—Continued political discourse of, and critics, 92–95 political discourse of, and electoral periods, 95–100 political discourse of, and support base, 89–92 provincial governments and, 43–44, 84, 172 SACP and COSATU and, 70, 82, 100, 169 strategic alliances and, 70, 82, 85, 87–89 UDF and, 68, 81, 87–88 Zulus and, 143–44, 147–49 Africans, see blacks Afrikaans language, 51–52, 56, 57, 109–11, 118, 132–33, 140, 193 n33 Coloured speaking, 52 Afrikaner EenheidsBeweging Party, 193 n20 Afrikaners, 165 civil service and, 192 n10 defined, 48, 48, 50–51, 193 n32 DP/DA and, 67, 74, 111, 125–27, 131–33, 138, 140, 142 IFP and, 162, 167 NP/NNP and, 16, 39, 72, 74, 103–4, 106, 108–11, 116, 121, 123, 166, 203 n20 PFP and Independent Party and, 126 antiapartheid (liberation) movement, 64, 80–81, 91–92, 98–99, 104–5, 127–28, 145, 165 see also apartheid antidefection clause, 40, 106, 110–11, 114, 122, 157 apartheid, 2, 41, 50, 64, 69, 82, 87–88, 104–5, 126, 145 race groups established by, 47–48, 52 Azanian People’s Organization (AZAPO), 67, 193 n20

Balkans, 13 ballot structure, 188 n4 see also dual ballot Bantu language family, 49–50 Basic Conditions of Employment Act (No. 74, 1997), 86 basic income grant, 140 Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), 49, 80–81, 145 black political movements, banned (1960s), 145 blacks (Africans) ANC and, 16, 39, 69–70, 85–87, 90–93, 95 cleavage, from whites, 70, 90 defined, 47–50, 48, 54–56, 55 DP/DA and, 66, 74, 125–26, 129, 134, 136, 138–40, 142 empowerment programs and, 57–59, 69, 86, 97 ethnic divisions within, 50, 87, 91–92 IFP and, 16, 156 middle and upper classes within, 58–59, 58, 69, 85–87, 95, 99 NP/NNP and, 72, 105, 108, 109, 110–11, 112, 118, 120, 123, 166, 203 n22 opposition parties and, 172 as proportion of population, 49 see also Zulus; and other specific ethnic and tribal groups Buthelezi, Prince Mangosuthu G., 37, 75, 140, 144–50, 152–58, 160, 162, 211nn44,46 census, 17, 48, 58, 136, 193 n25 centralization of power (nationalized power, nationalizing pressure of institutions), 3, 10, 33–34 ANC and, 43–44, 69–71, 83–84 DP/DA and, 127, 133–38, 141, 166 IFP and, 143–44, 149, 152–53, 155–56, 158–61

INDEX

nationwide vs. ethnic mobilization incentives and, 17–18, 21, 46, 163–66, 177–78, 182 NNP and, 116, 121, 122–23 plurality-based system and, 24 PR system and, 24, 27, 44–47 regional or provincial opposition parties and, 172 regional and tribal divisions prevented by, 39 Christian-Democratic principles, 72–73, 104, 106–8, 166 civil service, 64, 69, 192 n10 provincial, 42, 150 civil society, 87 class identity, 4, 17, 47–48, 90, 141, 149 race and, 52–59, 58, 76–77 closed-list proportional representation (PR) system, 39–40, 44–47, 69–70, 83–84, 111, 113–14, 121 “Coalition for Change” (DA-IFP alliance, 2004), 138–39, 157 coalitions, 11, 32 electoral rules and tier of power and, 14, 21–23 NNP and, 72–73 provincial, 66–67 see also specific parties and coalitions colonialism, 8–9, 79, 92 Coloureds, 193–94 n33 ANC and, 82, 86, 90–91, 97, 114, 120 debate over, as “race,” 52 defined, 48, 48, 52, 54–56, 55 DP/DA and, 66–67, 74, 76, 125, 128–29, 133, 136–40 IFP and, 156 NP and, 72, 105–6, 108, 110, 112–14, 116, 120, 123, 203 n20

249

concurrent powers, of national and provincial tiers, 41, 84, 192 n7 Congress Alliance (ANC-SACP, under apartheid), 80–81 Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU), 70, 140, 169, 198 n14, 199 n33 ANC alliance with, 80–82, 87–88, 96, 98, 169, 171 Congress of the People (COPE), 170–71, 200 n52 conservatism, 18, 67, 72–74, 87–88, 98, 72, 103–8, 111–14, 121, 125, 136, 143–44, 149, 151, 153–54, 156–57, 161–62, 167, 203 n2 Conservative Party, 131 Constituent Assembly (CA, 1994–96), 38–40, 82, 191 n1 constitutional engineering, 19, 22, 33, 35 Constitution of 1996, 39–41, 44, 72, 79, 82, 103–8, 111–14, 121, 129, 154, 157, 201 n3 constructivist theories, 6, 9, 12 Convention for a Democratic South Africa (CODESA) I and II, 127 corruption, 157, 170, 175, 193 n22 crime, 5, 94, 99, 117–19, 123, 130, 157, 170, 194 n41 Cronin, Jeremy, 98–99 crosscutting cleavages, 14, 28, 38, 121 death penalty, 118, 161 de Beer, Zach, 126–29 decentralized systems, 10, 21, 178–79 defections, 40, 73, 75, 106, 110–14, 122, 132, 157, 197 n18 de Klerk, F.W., 105, 107–8, 110, 128, 132, 201 n7 de Lille, Patricia, 75, 139

250

INDEX

democracy ethnic conflict and, 182 stability of, 101, 173–75 Democratic Party/Democratic Alliance (DP/DA), 116, 125–42 aggressive opposition by, and expansion of support, 73–74, 129–37 ANC and, 74, 81, 94–95, 98–99, 133–38, 209 n23 background of, under apartheid, 126–28 becomes main opposition party, 66–67, 141–42 “black vote” and, 66–67 campaign rhetoric of, 136–37, 139–41 class-based rhetoric of, 55, 59 constitutional negotiations and, 40, 44 elections of 1994 and, 81–82, 91, 146–47 elections of 1999 and, 64, 125, 130–37, 187 n39, 207 n30 elections of 2004 and, 64, 73, 125–26, 137–42, 187 n39 IFP and, 138–39, 159 minorities and, 74, 76 mobilization strategy of, and realignment of base, 71, 73–74, 134–36, 138–39, 165–66 NP/NNP and, 72, 74, 107, 111–12, 114–15, 120, 122, 132, 187 n39 provinces and, 160 race-class divisions and, 18, 34 regional base and, 144, 172 renamed DA, 66–67, 125, 138, 205 n1 shifts to ideological multiethnic tier, 67 voter registration and, 204 n33 democratization defined, 4–5

ethnic violence and, 3, 11–15, 19, 164, 175 devolution of power, 26, 39, 43, 146, 148, 157 dual ballot, 40, 44–45 Eastern Cape province, 43, 84, 132, 150, 155, 158, 169, 193 n22 economic issues, 6, 69, 99, 103, 117–19, 121, 137–38, 140, 156–57, 170–71, 194 n41 education, 53, 58, 69, 117, 123, 137, 157 elections active construction of ethnicity and, 11 by-elections, defined, 203 n25 campaigns, fieldwork and data collection, 17 delinking provincial from national, 172 elite strategy choices and coalitions required to win, 13–14 local, 1, 64, 203 n25 national, 1 party-centered, 15 registration fees for, 46 stability and apathy and, 173–74 see also racial census theory and specific elections and political parties elections, local (1994), 148 (1995–96), 64, 131, 143, 148, 150, 152–54, 157 (1997–98), 112, 131–32 (2000), 41, 64, 74, 187 n39 (2001), 205 (2005), 64 elections, national and provincial (1948), 51 (1994), 16–17, 38, 40, 45–46, 63–64, 72–73, 79–80, 194 n42, 197 n4; ANC and, 81–82, 91, 146–47; DP/DA

INDEX

and, 125, 127–28; IFP and, 82, 146–47; KZN and, 208–9 n9; NP and, 66, 72, 105, 132; voter turnout and, 174 (1999), 18, 37–38, 45–46, 63–64, 70–75; ANC and, 95–99, 116, 150; DP/DA and, 64, 125, 130–37, 187 n39, 207 n30; IFP and, 7–38, 144, 147, 150, 153–60; NNP and, 72, 104, 111–18, 122–23, 132, 166, 187 n39; UDM and, 169; voter turnout and, 174 (2004), 16–18, 63–64, 70, 72–75; ANC and, 63–64, 95–98, 150; DP/DA and, 64, 73, 125–26, 137–42, 187 n39; IFP and, 150, 153–59; NNP and, 64, 104, 114–15, 119–20, 122–23, 187 n39, 196 n14; voter turnout and, 173–74 (2009), 200 n52 electoral coalitions, 11, 30–31 electoral payoffs, 16, 32 electoral rules or system, 21–25, 28, 33–34, 40, 172, 174–76, 180, 188 n4 centralization of power and, 44–47, 83–84, 164, 191 n30 electoral violence, 67–68, 148 Employment Equity Act (No. 55, 1998), 86, 117 English ethnic group, 165 defined, 48, 48, 50–52 DP/DA and, 16, 67, 74, 125–28, 132, 140–42 ethnic conflict and violence, 5–6, 11–15, 64, 181–82 ethnic groups debate over protection of, vs. forced cooperation, 189 n8 small size of, and nationalized power, 3, 165 small size of, in South Africa, 17, 47, 57, 59–60, 71

251

South African, defined, 17, 38, 47–50, 48 ethnic homelands, 13 ethnic identity assumption of primacy of, 5–6, 10–11 building blocks of, 179–80 construction of, 3–4, 7–14, 176 latency of, without political activation, 13, 11, 21, 163–65, 175, 177, 187 n37 racial group vs., 47, 54–56 saliency of, vs. other identities, 29–30 ethnic mobilization (ethnopolitical divides), 11–17 disincentives for, and stability with little competition, 174–75 distribution of power and social demographics and, 21, 25–30, 69, 71, 177–79 electoral rules and, 23–25 institutional role in, 15–16, 164, 175 mobilization strategy incentive matrix and, 165, 177–79, 177 political strategy and, 3, 5, 12, 32 political transition and, 1–7, 11, 179–82 previous history of, 14 racial mobilization vs., 76–77 small group, and national system, 33–34 South African need for large-scale representation discourages, 15–16, 47, 59–60, 60–61, 64, 67–69, 85, 89–101, 125, 139, 141–42, 159, 161–64, 167–68, 171 sustained, as first step in ethnic conflict, 14 ethnofederal regions, 179 executive branch, 39–40, 64

252

INDEX

Federal Alliance, 193 n20 federal system ANC and, 43, 83 closed-list PR system and, 83 distribution of power and ethnic mobilization in, 26–27 electoral system and, 191 n30 IFP and, 146, 149–51, 153–54, 157, 161 NP and, 39–40, 103, 107 prevention of ethnic conflict and, 35 PRP and, 126 South African tiers of power and, 17, 40–44 unitary systems vs., 33 first-past-the-post (FPTP) plurality systems, 24–25, 128, 212 n14 floor crossing, 40, 75, 83, 172, 196–97nn15,18, 205 n1 Freedom Charter, 39, 80, 90, 145 Freedom Front (FF), 60, 115, 131, 193 n20 Freedom Front Plus (FF+), 67 Free State province, 84, 107, 170 fringe group mobilization, 22 Gauteng province, 97–99, 107, 111–12, 115–16, 122, 131–33, 135–36, 147–48, 155, 159, 166, 172 Gauteng Youth Action, 203 n22 globalization, 6, 70 Government of National Unity (GNU), 38, 72–73, 105–8, 147, 151–53, 201 n3 group size factor, 14, 30, 47, 57 Growth, Employment, and Redistribution (GEAR) program, 88, 97, 151, 169 Hani, Chris, 174 Harare Declaration (1988), 38–39, 191 n2 health issues, 157 see also HIV/AIDS Health Ministry, 130

Herstigte Nasionale Party (HNP), 112 HIV/AIDS, 140, 157, 170, 193 n23 Holomisa, Bantu, 46, 93–94, 193 n22 Home Affairs Ministry, 162 homelands, 104, 145, 165 hostel areas, 50, 147, 174 House of Assembly (Nationalist rule), 126, 127 identity documents, 117, 160, 204 n33 immigration policy, 160 Independent Democrats (ID) party, 75, 139, 172 Independent Electoral Commission (IEC), 44, 46, 73, 82, 146, 173, 209 n9, 212 n9 Independent Party, 126 India, 10, 31, 212 n14 Indian National Congress (India), 80 Indian racial group, 39 ANC and, 82, 86, 90, 91, 97 class divide within, 52–53 defined, 48–49, 48, 52–56, 55 DP/DA and, 66–67, 74, 76, 125, 128–29, 133–34, 136–40 IFP and, 156 NP and, 105, 116 individual vs. group rights, 39–40 Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP), 16, 125, 143–62, 165 ANC and, 145, 147, 151–53 attempt to move beyond ethnic to national support base, 18, 34, 67, 74–75, 143 background of, 16, 144–47 campaign rhetoric of, 157–59 constitutional negotiations and, 40, 44 crime and, 118 DP/DA and, 138–40 elections of 1994 and, 82, 146–47, 209nn12,21 elections of 1999 and, 37–38, 144, 147, 150, 153–60

INDEX

elections of 2004 and, 150, 153–59 ethnic origins of, 16 federal council, 152–53 federal system and, 83 GNU and, 38, 151–53, 201 n3 internal divisions and, 147, 153–55 mobilization strategies and national power issue, 153–56, 159, 166–67 provincial power and problems of, 147–51 as regional force, 172 repositioning attempts of, 147, 149–53 UDF and, 145 Inkatha kaZulu (precursor to IFP), 144 Inkatha Yenkululeko Yesizwe (National Cultural Liberation Movement), 145 Institute for Democracy in South Africa (Idasa), 130, 200 n38 institutional factors (political institutions), 9–10, 12, 16, 110–11, 121–22, 125–26, 140–41, 175 ANC shapes, to reduce ethnic mobilization, 69–70, 79, 82–85, 100 defined, 21–27 interaction of, with social cleavages, and incentives, 3, 6–7, 13–15, 18, 23, 31–35, 60–61, 155, 164–66, 175–82 see also specific institutions and political actors institutionalist theory, 10 institutional vacuum, 5, 180–81 instrumentalists, 7–8, 9 Interim Constitution, 38, 42, 127, 201 n3 Iraq, 24–25, 32–33, 35, 164, 178–79, 191 n29 Interim Governing Council (IGC), 32

253

National Assembly elections (2005), 33 tribal divisions, 179 Iraq Study Group, 178–79 isiNdebele language, 49 isiXhosa language, 49 isiZulu language, 49 job creation, 117–18, 157, 170 Johannesburg, 50, 128, 129, 131 Jordan, Pallo, 90–92 Kenya, 1, 170 Khoi, 48–49, 52 Khoi-San or “bushmen,” 49 kinship, 7 Kriel, Hernus, 108, 113, 201 n7 KwaZulu homeland, 145–46 KwaZulu-Natal province (KZN), 42, 63, 66–67, 74–75, 82, 96, 100, 116, 119–20, 133–34, 140, 143–61, 166–67, 173, 197 n4, 201 n4, 208 n7, 209 n9 creation of, in 1994, 147 IFP premiers swapped, 153–54 powerlessness of provincial government in, 149–53 labor, 86, 140 see also trade unions land reform, 97 language groups, 47, 53 see also specific languages language policy, 123 Leadership (magazine), 131 left, 70, 82, 87–89, 101, 198 n17 legislation ANC and drafting of, 86, 100 IFP and GNU and, 152 legislative assemblies, proportionality and, 40 legislative fragmentation, 26 Lekota, Patrick “Terror” (Mosiuoa), 84, 170 Leon, Tony, 74, 94, 129–30, 132–33, 135, 140, 208 n46

254 Lesotho, 50 liberals, 73, 98, 106, 110, 113–14, 125–28, 130–33, 141, 161, 165 Limpopo province, 170 local governments, 40–41, 172–73 localized power, 3, 15, 21–22, 26–27, 41, 46, 83, 117, 179 lower classes, 52, 58, 58 see also poor; working class Magashule, Ace, 170 majoritarian constituency model, PR model vs., 24–25 majoritarian democracy, 85 Malan, Wynand, 126 Malatsi, David, 109, 202 n14 Malawi, 2, 29–30 Mandela, Nelson, 80–81, 93–94, 97–98, 128, 146, 152, 174, 209 n23 Mandela, Winnie Madikizela-, 130, 170 Marais, Peter, 113–14, 202 n11 marginal groups, 25 Mass Democratic Movement (MDM), 81 Mavuso, John, 109, 202 n14 Mbeki, Thabo, 70, 97–99, 139, 152, 157, 169, 171, 199 n37, 200nn47,49, 211 n5 Mbulawa, Dr. Bukelwa, 132 McKenzie, Patrick, 109, 113, 202 n14 media, 93, 129–31 median voter, 22 Meyer, Roelf, 106, 108–10, 113, 132, 201 n7, 203 n22 Meyer, Tobie, 202 n16 middle class, 52–53, 58, 58 military, 13 Miller, Peter, 42 minimum thresholds for representation, 22 Minority Front (MF), 67, 193 n20

INDEX

minority rights issue, 103, 118 minority voters, South African DP/DA and, 74, 125–26, 133–34, 136–42, 165, 166 as multiracial opposition, 76–77 NP/NNP and, 72, 116–19, 121–23 mixed ancestry. 48 see also Coloureds Mnisi, William, 132 mobilization strategies, 165 broader lessons for, 175–82 incentive matrix and, 165, 177–79, 177 institutional and societal incentives and, 18 menu of, and social fabric, 34–35 shaping, 21–35 see also ethnic mobilization Morkel, Gerald, 113 Morogoro Conference (1969), 90 Motlanthe, Kgalema, 169 Motshega, Mathole, 83, 199 n33 Movement for Multiparty Democracy (MMD, Zambia), 2 Mozambique, 178 Mpumalanga province, 155, 159 Mtshali, Lionel, 153–54 Mugabe, Robert, 118 multiethnic strategy, 72, 137, 156, 164 multipartyism, 189 n5 multiracial strategy, 76, 108, 125, 133, 140–42, 156, 164 “muscular liberalism,” 130 Muslims, 53 Naidoo, Sathie, 202 n16 Namibia, 2 Congress of Democrats (CoD), 170 Nasionale Pers (National Papers), 111 Natal, 146 see also KwaZulu-Natal province Natal Workshop for African Advancement (NWAA), 145

INDEX

“nation,” vs. “ethnic group,” 4 National Assembly (NA, lower house), 75, 82, 105, 121, 128–30, 133, 135, 143–44, 152, 159 ANC dominance of, 63–66, 171 antidefection clause and, 110 interim constitution and, 201 n3 Joint Standing Committee on Public Accounts, 129 provincial tax laws and, 43 need for many seats to influence policy in, 4, 46–47, 60, 71–72, 76, 89 opposition seats in (1994–2004), 66–68 seats allocation method and, 44–45, 68 national cabinet, 75, 100, 105, 107–8, 146, 153–54, 160, 201 n3, 209 n23 National Council of Provinces (NCOP), 41, 84, 100, 116–17, 121, 132, 160 National Democratic Movement, 126 nationalism, 9–10, 13 National Party / New National Party (NNP/NP), 103–23, 125, 165 ANC and, 73, 94–95, 98, 127, 130–31, 187 n39 antidefection clause and, 110 apartheid rule of, 38, 79, 126, 145 attempt to shift to ideological, multiethnic tier, 67, 72–73, 103–5, 107 background of, 16, 104–5 campaign rhetoric of, 117–21 changing strategies of, 72–73, 108–9 constitutional negotiations and, 39–40 debate over future of, postapartheid, 103–9

255

decline of, 67, 71–73, 111–12, 115–16, 121–23, 159, 167, 187 n39 DP/DA and, 67, 127–28, 130–34, 139–40, 187 n39 elections of 1994 and, 66, 72, 105, 132 elections of 1999 and, 72, 104, 111–18, 122–23, 132, 166, 187 n39 elections of 2004 and, 64, 104, 114–15, 119–20, 122–23, 187 n39, 196 n14 electoral strategies of, 115–16, 121–23 ethnicity and, 29 Federal Congress, 109 Federal Executive, 109–10 federal system and, 83 GNU and, 38, 73, 106–8, 151–52, 201 n3 IFP and, 146 Interim Constitution and, 127 internal divisions in, 109–11, 113–15, 153, 203 n22 minority vote and, 76 mobilization strategy shifts and, 72–73, 116–17, 166 name changed to NNP, 107–8, 111–12, 201 n1, 202–3 n20 national vs. regional strategy of, 107, 115–16, 119–21 parliamentary effectiveness of, 130–31 provinces and, 144, 160 race-class overlap and, 18, 34 voter registration and, 204 n33 Western Cape and, 73, 82 national tier, 25–27, 40–41, 59–61, 67, 83–84, 163–64, 167, 171–72 see also centralization of power; and specific legislative bodies “national-to-national” lists, 44 Native Affairs Bill (1920), 144 Ndebele group, 48, 49

256

INDEX

neoliberal economics, 88, 134 Ngonyama, Smuts, 93, 199 n26 Ngubane, Ben, 154 Nguni language family, 49–50 Nigeria, 1, 2, 27, 60, 178–79, 181 “no-go” zones, 146, 149, 208 n7 nongovernmental sector, 64 nonviolence, 80 Northern Cape province, 43, 49, 72, 84, 107, 116, 199 n33 Northern Sotho language, 49–50 Northwest province, 67 Operation Vula, 81 overseas voters rights’, 117 Pan Africanist Congress (PAC), 60, 67, 71, 75, 80, 88, 118, 127, 139, 174, 209 n23 parliamentary seats, allocation of, 31 parliamentary systems, 27 patronage, 8–9, 103, 149–51, 160, 169 Pedi group, 48, 49 permissive electoral system, 24, 32–33, 68, 121–22, 163, 165 personalized politics, 83 Pietermaritzburg, 148 Platteland, 115, 131 pluralism, 156 plurality systems, small group representation and, 25 political identities, 12–13 political openings, defined, 4 political parties ANC dominance and influence on, 68–71, 83 barriers to entry and, 23, 46 candidate list selection by, 44 decisions of, about what groups to mobilize, 31–32 discipline and unity within, 46, 71, 83–84 electoral systems and number of, 188 n4 elite strategy choices and, 12–13

ethnic entrepreneurs, counteracted by close-list PR system, 83 formation of, 28–31 fragmentation of, 23, 25, 45–46 multiethnic mobilization by, encouraged by nationalized power, 164 need for winning electoral coalitions, 3–4, 21, 46–47 power distribution and shape of, 26–27 role of, in ethnic mobilization and identity choice, 15, 175–76 South African election results by (1994–2004), 65 stability of, at price of democratic atrophy, 169–75 see also specific parties political party-centric system, 15, 163–64, 173 political violence, 146, 149, 164, 174 poor, 53, 79, 85–88, 90, 140, 173 Port Elizabeth, 132 Portuguese ethnic group, SA, 51 postcommunist states, 10–11, 13 postconflict transitional regimes, 181 poverty, 69, 157 power, distribution or locus of, 3, 19, 21–22, 25–27, 32–34, 163, 176–79, 177 see also centralization of power; devolution of power power sharing, 112, 181, 201 n3 presidency, power of, 71 Presidential Review Commission (PRC), 43–44 presidential systems, 27 “previously advantaged” vs. “previously disadvantaged,” 49, 90, 99, 137 primordialists, 7, 9, 29, 30, 57 private property, 118 privatization, 87, 151 Progressive Federal Party (PFP), 126

INDEX

Progressive Party, 126–27 proportional representation (PR) electoral system, 23–25, 39, 60, 67–70, 188 n4, 212 n14 centralization of power and, 27, 44–47, 164 DP/DA and, 128, 142 IFP and, 159 locus of power and social landscape and, 176–77 multipartyism and, 25, 76, 189 n5 NP/NNP and, 40, 123 see also closed-list proportional representation system provinces (provincial tier) allocation of seats to National Assembly and, 44–45 ANC dominance of, 63–66 budget constraints on, 42–43, 149–51 ceding more power to, to strengthen opposition parties, 172–73 debate over scraping entirely, 43–44 elections and, 1 ethnic homogeneity of, 172 legislatures, 44, 67, 72, 110 mobilization in, little reward for, 46 power of, 33, 40–43, 84–85, 112, 143–44, 149, 147–51, 157, 160, 192 n7, 193 n23 premiers, 66, 84, 160, 195 n3 support base and, 154 as unattractive arenas for political contest, 46–47 see also specific elections, political parties, and provinces Provincial Revenue Taxation Act (2001), 192 n12 “provincial-to-national” seats, 44–45 race defined, 4, 9–11

257

DP/DA and, 136–37, 139, 141 IFP and, 156 NP/NNP and, 121 social identity and, 17, 54–57, 55, 76 South African groups defined, 38, 47–48, 48, 193 n24 see also blacks (Africans); Coloureds; Indians; whites; and specific language and ethnic groups race-class overlap, 18, 38, 56–59, 58, 76–77, 121, 137, 141 racial census theory, 57, 142, 166, 194 n42 racial mobilization, 2, 57–59, 67, 76–77, 163, 172 “two nation” rhetoric and, 70–71, 98–99 racism, 10, 56–57, 136–37 Rainbow Nation, 89–90 Ramaphosa, Cyril, 83, 171 Ramathlodi, Ngoako, 170 Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP), 81, 88, 169 regional tier of government, 21, 26–27, 47, 84, 133, 143–44, 148, 151, 167, 169, 172–73, 178 see also provinces religious identities, 10, 17, 26, 38, 47, 53–55, 54, 107, 110 rural areas, 50, 56, 75, 87, 96, 115, 121, 132, 144, 146–50, 156–59, 161, 167 Rwanda, 101 San, 48–49, 52 Sarafina II scandal, 130 Sexwale, Tokyo, 83, 171 Shell House shootings, 130, 146 Shilowa, Mbhazima (Sam), 98, 170, 200 n44, 212 n10 Sigcau, Stella, 94, 193 n22

258

INDEX

Singh, Narend, 154 Sisulu, Max, 80, 199 n31 siSwati language, 49 Skills Development Act (No. 97, 1997), 86 Skosana, Ben, 152 small groups, 21, 24–25, 27, 31–32, 178 small parties, 24, 45, 76, 176–77 social cleavage model, 28 social constructivists, 7 social contracts, 6 social demographics (cleavages, divides), 3, 16–17, 19, 22–23, 32–35 fundamental cleavages, defined, 30–31 interaction of, with institutions, 31–35, 27, 163, 165 mobilization strategy incentive matrix and, 165, 177–79, 177 structure of, 28–31 structure of, in South Africa, 47–59 see also specific groups and identities social identities, 4, 27, 194 n41 active construction of, by political actors, 11–12 crosscut, 38 interactional factors and, 57–59, 177 layered and nested, 38 number, size, and types of, in South Africa, 47–59, 48, 54–55, 58 see also specific ethnic, language, racial, and religious groups socialism, 146, 151 Sotho language family, 48, 49–50 South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC), 37, 200 n38 South African Communist Party (SACP), 70, 80–82, 87–88, 98–99, 118, 170–71

South African Congress of Trade Unions (SACTU), 80 South African Defense Force (SADF), 105, 180–81 South African Institute of Race Relations (SAIRR), 56 South African Native National Congress (SANNC), 80 South African police, 105 Southern Sotho, 49–50 South West African People’s Organization (SWAPO, Namibia), 170 Soweto, 99 uprising (1976), 80 standard of living, 137 state, power of, to shape ethnic and racial identity, 8–12, 15 state weakness, 5, 180 strategic choices, 17 structural theories, 5–6 structure of government, 26 subnationalism, 9 subregional governments, 22 Sudan, 2 Sunni-Shi’a-Kurd conflict (Iraq), 32–33, 179 Suzman, Helen, 126 swart gevaar (black peril) tactics, 113, 136 Swazi group, 48, 49 Tambo, Oliver, 80 taxes, 42–43, 140, 192 n12 “Third Force” violence, 174 trade unions, 87–88, 101, 140, 170, 198 n14 traditional leaders, 151–52, 158 traditional values, 74–75, 144, 157–58 Transitional Executive Council (TEC), 180 transitional phase active identity construction during, 11

INDEX

continuity during, 180–82 ethnic violence and, 1 prospects for conflict during, 179–82 in South Africa, 64, 105, see also Government of National Unity; Interim Constitution Transkei region, 169 Transvaal province, 106 tribes and tribalism, 4, 7–8, 32–33, 37, 39, 49, 150, 179 Tripartite Alliance (ANC-SACPCOSATU), 70, 82, 87–88, 169, 198 n17 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), 90, 109, 202 n17 Tshwete, Steve, 98 Tsonga, 49 Tswana, 48, 49–50 “two nations” rhetoric, 70–71, 90–91, 99 Ubhoko, 145, 208 n3 Umkhonto weSizwe (Spear of the Nation), 80 unemployment, 56, 69, 117–18, 140, 194 n41 Union of South Africa, 80 unitary state or system, 27 ANC desire for, 43–44 federal systems vs., 33 South Africa as, 38–39 United Christian Democratic Front, 193 n20 United Christian Democratic Party (UCDP), 67 United Democratic Front (UDF), 64, 68–69, 81, 87–89, 98, 145 United Democratic Movement (UDM), 75, 132, 169, 171–72 United National Independence Party (UNIP, Zambia), 2 United Nations, 173 United Party, 126

259

United States Department of State, 178 Iraq and, 32–33 race in, 9–11 universal suffrage, 39 upper classes, 58, 58, 149 urban areas, 50, 53, 56, 66–67, 121, 132, 146, 148–50, 156, 174 van der Merve, Koos, 162 van Schalkwyk, Marthinus, 64, 73, 94, 107–9, 111, 113, 119–20, 123, 204 n34, 208 n46 Venda group, 48, 49 voters ethnic cues and, 11–12 registration of, 117, 204 n33 turnout and apathy among, 173–74, 212 n13 voting districts, 45 voting rights, 39 Vryheidsfront/Freedom Front (VF/VV), 112 waste and fraud, 43 Western Cape province, 49, 52, 66–67, 72–73, 82, 96, 98, 100, 105, 107–8, 110–16, 120, 122, 131–33, 135, 137–38, 140, 156, 166, 172, 202 n11, 206 n27, 210 n41 Western Europe, 29–30 whites, 39 ANC and, 70, 82, 90–91, 93–94, 98, 99 DP/DA and, 16, 66–67, 128–29, 131–33, 137, 142 IFP and, 156 -nonwhite political divide, 70, 76, 90–91, 99 NP/NNP and, 16, 72, 105–6, 108, 111–13, 116, 118, 123 as racial group, in South Africa, 48, 48, 50–51, 55–56, 55 as racial group, in U.S., 10

260 Woods, Gavin, 210 n41 working class, 53, 79, 82, 85–88 Worrall, Denis, 126 Xhosa, 48, 48–50, 56, 158 battles with Zulus, 50, 67, 174 Yengeni, Tony, 170 Yoruba, 9, 27 Yugoslavia, former, 13, 164 Zambia, 2, 29–30, 59, 81, 187 n37 zero-sum competition, 22, 182 “zero tolerance,” 118 Zimbabwe, 2, 118, 140, 209 n23 African Patriotic Front-African National Union merger, 152

INDEX

Congress of Trade Unions, 169 Movement for Democratic Change, 169 Zulu, Bishop Alphaeus Hamilton, 145 Zulu kingdom, 146–48, 153, 158 Zulu monarchy, 40, 146–48, 158 Zulus, 165 ANC and, 150–51 defined, 48, 48–50, 56 IFP and, 16, 37–38, 143–62, 166–67 IFP attempt to expand beyond, 156–57 Xhosa battles with, 50, 67, 174 Zuma, Jacob, 97, 169, 170–71 Zwellithini, King Goodwill, 147–48, 158

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