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%) and coloured (5%), while its small white minority (8.9% of the population) comprises a disproportionately large part of the middle class (28%) and the upper class (57%). 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 periodically unleashed on the country’s African immigrant community (the largest on the continent).        

The effects of South Africa’s state capture are likely to continue to be felt for years to come. The widespread damage inflicted to democratic infrastructure will be slow to repair and the challenge of rooting out entrenched malgovernance is made greater by weakened accountability institutions. The political dominance of the ANC within South Africa means that its factional battles have had a destabilising effect on the broader population, with an expert panel concluding they had contributed to the civil unrest in July 2021, which claimed over 350 lives. Of concern too are the political attacks on the judiciary, which in recent history has proven to be the most effective check on the country’s executive and legislative branches. Commentators have indicated that this political hostility is a result of the judiciary having been increasingly drawn into the political sphere to resolve political disputes and failings – a pattern that is unlikely to disappear in the near future. Undoubtedly related to these developments, is the continued decline in South Africans’ satisfaction with democracy, which Afrobarometer’s 2018 data show to have reached its lowest level since 2000 (when Afrobarometer conducted its first South African survey).