Introduction

Given the state of racial discourse on both the South African left and right, and the failure of social movements to produce – through struggle – a black subject who is at the centre of her own liberation, a progressive discussion of race and gender is needed now more than ever. Such a discussion must be drawn from the vocabularies of resistance emerging from the ruins and pitfalls of the anticolonial nationalisms, which ensured the sovereignty of the state but wrote the people out of power and history. The emergence of new social movements is evidence that many South Africans remain sceptical of power that demands that impoverished blacks buy back land that was stolen from them, that claims a flourishing economy in spite of 40% unemployment, and that valorises the commodification (and resulting denial) of basic services including education, water, and electricity as a development strategy. Many South Africans are increasingly wary of ‘empowerment – as captured by the values of an NGO or the Black Economic Empowerment programme, both of which seek to open capitalism's door to the previously disadvantaged (i.e. those whose bodies and breath powered capitalist accumulation but were not nourished by it). Movement members are searching instead for power that facilitates and enhances – quite bluntly, they are still after a democracy that will include them. Yet, because of the state of representation within the post-apartheid social movements, a thorough analysis of racialised oppression has not emerged from within these movements. Unless resistance includes broader goals of liberation, voice, agency, and dignity for blacks, social movement structures may become privilege systems with their own power to create change for the worse.

Our search for progressive ways of thinking about persistent racialised oppression should not be mistaken as a quest for a singular theory, for it is rather a call to listen to the ways in which people speak, and to recognise the power of certain prevailing constraints on speech. We will focus on the ways in which dominant voices in the left narrate the basis for struggle, and how these narratives have served to constrain the terms of debate and crowd out alternative narratives.