Modern cooperatives have existed for over 150 years and are found in nearly every corner of the globe. Although cooperative trade only registers at one per cent of world trade, a 2007 International Cooperative Alliance (ICA) study shows that the top 300 cooperatives are equivalent to the tenth largest economy, and while they make up a small fraction of global trade, cooperatives have continued to survive in the difficult global capitalist conditions that prevail today. While their survival is impressive, cooperatives are extraordinary not for their economic success but rather for the principles and values that constitute their inherent character. Of these values and principles, democratic ownership, one-member-one-vote, collective decision making, and an ethic of cooperation and solidarity (as opposed to individualism and competition) lie at the heart of genuine worker-owned cooperatives.

Cooperatives also have a long and multifaceted history in South Africa. From the racially determined apartheid cooperatives to the post-apartheid black economic empowerment approach to cooperatives, they have featured prominently in the economy for much of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries and have been instrumental to development over the last sixty years. There have been markedly different approaches to cooperatives over this period. Today there is a sharply defined duality: on one side the emerging black cooperatives and on the other the older and established (mostly white) ‘cooperatives’. This duality also reflects their impact on the economy. Emerging cooperatives have tended to target poverty alleviation and local-level development, while the established cooperatives have been concentrated in the agro-processing sector and have significant assets and turnovers. We focus primarily on the emerging cooperatives in this chapter.

Using interviews, field visits and existing literature, we look at the shift from apartheid to post-apartheid cooperative development, and focus on the use and appropriation of the white cooperative development experience in the contemporary black economic empowerment context. Instead of providing a narrative history of cooperative development, we concentrate on how the past shapes the present and what is at stake. We argue that emulating the Afrikaner empowerment approach does not engender genuine cooperative development, but rather abuses the cooperative form for perverse forms of economic development. Post-apartheid South Africa has gone this way with disastrous consequences. Instead of engendering genuine cooperatives grounded in values, principles, cooperative identity and advantage, a business approach to cooperatives has been promoted.