WeeklySA_AdminPOPULAR: Once associated with socialism, the language of participation has been co-opted. How was this radical idea depoliticised?
By Luke Sinwell
As an undergraduate anthropology student at Hartwick College in New York more than 20 years ago, Paulo Freire’s Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1970) profoundly shaped my understanding of how racial capitalism is designed to systematically perpetuate poverty and inequality.
Freire’s literacy and development campaigns in Latin America were centred on the idea that popular education and participation must be embedded within the knowledge systems of the oppressed. The links between popular participation in governance and Freirean thought, however, are rarely given adequate attention.
My book The Participation Paradox: Between Bottom-up and Top-Down Development in South Africa (2023) demonstrates how Freirean-Marxist thinking associated with anticolonial resistance of the 1960s and 1970s has been watered-down and depoliticised by neoliberal discourses of local ownership, empowerment, and popular participation.
It is no accident that the language of participation, once associated with socialism, self-determination, and indigenous control over a nation’s resources, was adapted to suit the economic and political interests of the Washington Consensus and World Bank, which sought to “roll back the state” and enforce structural adjustment programmes. The World Bank’s major publication, Voices of the Poor: Can Anyone Hear Us? (2000) was based on material gathered in 23 countries with 60 000 respondents.
The book was a plea to those in power to place the historic victims of development in the driver’s seat. To put it another way, for development to be successful the poor and marginalised must participate in decision-making that affects their lives.
Who could be against the idea of listening to the most vulnerable? But the paradox is that the call for inclusion is part of a broader strategy of exclusion. Within this framework, the poor’s voices should be heard and amplified, but they should not seek to obtain any form of substantial authority that could challenge the hegemonic order.
Participation:The New Tyranny? (2001), which I came across as a postgraduate student in Development Studies at Witwatersrand University, was among the first major publications to systematically question whether the international proliferation of the idea of participation paradoxically served to legitimate the interests of those in power.
The ideas in this book were persuasive to me and many others at the time who wished to come to grips with the myriad ways in which people living in poverty were trapped, not because of their own doing, but by systemic relationships of power.
Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation took the debate a step further by suggesting that although participation is prone to manipulation and can lead to the imposition of plans from above, it is also a process that is contested from below.
I was attracted to this volume since, like Freire, it argued that despite oppressive conditions, people nevertheless have the capacity to liberate themselves. Participation: From Tyranny to Transformation was among the first to make a careful distinction between institutionalised forms of participation and non-institutionalized forms—something that the literature tends to obscure more generally (in favour of institutionalised forms, those which are relatively controlled from the top-down or what may be called state-centric).
In South Africa, the ANC jettisoned the “people-driven” and redistributive Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) in favour of neoliberal or market-oriented policy which perpetuates rather than challenges the status quo.
The Participation Paradox: Between Bottom-up and Top-down Development in South Africa explores the dialectical relationship between the state and popular resistance in the post-apartheid period by drawing from a case of an exceptionally militant and class-conscious community called Thembelihle, an informal settlement in the southwest of Johannesburg. Mobilizing in the absence of a national counter-hegemonic movement, grassroots militants must negotiate with those authorities who create the very misery that they seek to challenge.
The book suggests that in the lead-up to the 2024 national elections, it is likely that the threat to the ANC of losing votes alongside the disruption of everyday life through protest, occupations and boycotts will, as it did previously in Thembelihle and elsewhere, have a major effect on how this party and former liberation movement organises itself.
Grassroots movements and activists will likely need to reimagine their relationship with the state and other powerful actors if they are to avoid revisiting another 30 years of racial capitalism under the façade of listening to the voices of the poor.
Luke Sinwell is an associate professor at the Centre for Sociological Research and Practice (CSRP) at the University of Johannesburg. The article was sourced from Africa is a Country, a site of opinion, analysis, and new writing on and from the African left.
Comment
VIOLENT ABUSE OF WOMEN MUST STOP
Despite repeated pleas from authorities and influential members of the public for an end to abuse of any form against women, South Africa continues to experience an increase in the number of women who are abused and murdered every day. South Africa, which ranks among the five countries with the highest female homicide rates along with Central and South American countries including El Salvador, Venezuela and Honduras, celebrated National Women’s Day on Wednesday this week. The event, which was graced by President Cyril Ramaphosa, was to pay tribute to the bravery and determination of the thousands of women – led by ANC veterans including Lillian Ngoyi – who took part in the 1956 march against imposed pass laws by the apartheid government.
Having suffered years of discrimination especially in the workplace for years, women continue to relentlessly fight for gender equality. And many have paid a heavy price for standing up for their rights. Hundreds of women continue to bear the brunt of violent attacks from their partners. South Africa has the highest femicide rate in Africa with an average of about nine women being murdered daily. According to the police crime statistics released in May this year, a total 969 women were murdered, about one thousand raped and 1485 cases of attempted murder against women were reported during the first three months of 2023.
It is also shocking that domestic violence is still the most common and widespread human rights abuse in this country where one in five women are victims. The Eastern Cape has emerged as the leading province with cases of gender-based violence. The latest victim is wellknown physiotherapist, Marolien Schmidt (40) who was stabbed to death during an alleged robbery at her home in Gqeberha in the early hours of Wednesday – National Women’s Day .
The abuse and killing of women has to stop because of the physical and emotional impact it has on children, families and society as a whole. Police must leave no stone unturned in tracing the perpetrators of these crimes and preparing strong cases that can help our courts to impose lengthy jail terms upon their conviction. Women are the pillars of our homes and society at large. Enough has been said against the abuse and murder of these vulnerable members of our society. Community members must knock on their consciences and make a pledge to defend our mothers and sisters who are ill-treated by the very people who had initially promised to love and take care of them until death separates them.
Addressing the National Women’s Day celebrations in Pretoria this week, President Ramaphosa condemned the continuing trend of violent abuse of women and declared that those arrested for assaulting or abusing women should not be granted bail by our courts. Suspects found guilty of murdering women must be jailed for life. We hope this message will reach the ears of the police and our presiding court officers whose duty it is to protect women who are always exposed to violence.
