South Africa

South African society has been deeply marked by over 300 years of racial discrimination, imposed first during Dutch and then British colonial rule, and later formalised under Apartheid. Through social and labour controls, the Apartheid system ensured that South Africans of different races were spatially segregated and set on highly unequal socio-economic paths. South Africa’s post-Apartheid governments have had limited success in reversing the effects of this social engineering. Whilst affirmative action policies have helped create an emergent black middle class, South Africa’s society is one of the world’s most unequal and the inequality remains racialised. Its chronically poor (nearly half of the population) are almost exclusively black (95 per cent) and coloured (5 per cent), while its small white minority (8.9 per cent of the population) comprises a disproportionately large part of the middle class (28 per cent) and elite (57 per cent). The continued urban segregation in major cities such as Johannesburg and Cape Town reflects and perpetuates this stratification.

Racial and economic inequality, in combination with widespread sexism, has helped sustain one of the highest of rates of gender based-violence in the world. Government legislative action on the issue means the country has a highly sophisticated legal framework governing discrimination and violence, but its response has been criticised for a lack of resources. Race, class and gender are not the only cleavages in South African politics. South Africa has 11 official languages and four racial groups and ethnolinguistic identities constitute an important political cleavage, particularly at the sub-national level. Salient too, is the nativist nationalism that has long had currency in South African politics and society and increasingly threatens the ‘Rainbow Nation’ cosmopolitanism introduced by Nelson Mandela’s administration. It has been visible in anti-minority narratives on economic transformation, in restrictive immigration policies and in the xenophobic violence that has marked periods of the country’s recent history. In meeting these and other challenges, South Africa benefits from a vibrant civil society, which through strategic litigation has succeeded in using the country’s acclaimed constitution to secure pioneering human rights and democratic protections. Indeed, the South African Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence is internationally respected, particularly on questions of socio-economic rights.

Looking ahead, it will be important to watch how the emergence of new parties could alter the political landscape. Of concern are the political attacks on the judiciary, which in the post-Apartheid era has proven to be the most effective check on the country’s executive and legislative branches.