The post-apartheid ANC government took pride in repurposing the country as a modern, democratic state and promoted a vision of science and technology for the common good. Astronomy was a particular beneficiary of the new dispensation. The Southern African Large Telescope at Sutherland was part of the dividend resulting from the country’s transition to democracy and the decommissioning of nuclear weaponry. Mandela’s successor, Thabo Mbeki, advocated national renewal through an ‘African Renaissance’ that promoted both indigenous knowledge and scientific ambition. Mbeki’s suspicion of the authority of Western science and his Africanist affinities impelled him to intervene in the controversy surrounding HIV/AIDS and to support AIDs denialism. It has often been alleged that Mbeki was caught between ‘indigenous’ and ‘Western’ knowledge, yet his scientific legacy was more complex. In fields such as ethno-botany, for instance, there is evidence of complementary research in post-apartheid South Africa between scientists and carriers of African knowledge of plant medicines. The process of developing a new spirit of ‘South Africanism’ in the post-apartheid rainbow nation meant greater openness to South Africa’s position as an African nation, while also inviting bids leadership of Africa through ‘big science’ initiatives like astronomy and Antarctic research.

By the 2010s, the Solidarity Movement boasted over 300,000 members and claimed to represent, by extension, a million Afrikaners. In 2015, it overtly positioned itself as an ‘alternative government’ or ‘state’ for Afrikaners amid ANC-led majority ‘domination’. Drawing on media analysis, interviews with executive members, and ethnography, this chapter investigates the discursive and organisational strategies that underlie the Movement’s contemporary campaigns and assertions. Discursively, the Movement proffered a selective historicalnarratives that obscured class, effaced apartheid-era injustices, and naturalised racial differences to present itself as the post-apartheid defender of a marginalised minority. Organisationally, it sought to create institutional, community, and even virtual spaces for Afrikaner autonomy and to perform state-like functions. The analysis reveals how these strategies reflected and inflected opportunities offered by the global hegemony of neoliberal policies, rationalities, and discourse amid the local specificities of majority rule. Placing the Movement’s strategies in conversation with social movement scholarship and theorisation on race and neoliberalism, it argues that Solidarity’s discursive and organisational strategies offer new insight into the opportunities for extra-parliamentary political mobilisation in the context of constitutional democracy and late capitalism, and how race is refashioned in the neoliberal epoch.

The Introduction presents the book’s central historiographical and analytical argument – that a focus on white workers facilitates a critical examination of class alongside race, as historically contingent social phenomena, in late and post-apartheid South Africa. This contributes a view from the South to international debates on identity and inequality in the context of late capitalism. South Africa boasts a rich historical scholarship on white working-class lives in the early twentieth century. Yet when it comes to the apartheid and post-apartheid periods, white workers and considerations of class are largely absent. This results in a homogenising view of white society – a scholarly blind spot reflecting not only the widespread acceptance of ideas surrounding apartheid-era white embourgeoisement, but also the ‘death’ of class analysis and the dominance of identity debates. This book returns class to analytical prominence alongside race. In contrast to dominant ‘elite transition’ views, it introduces the idea of a ‘long transition’ from the 1970s, as labour reform heralded the dismantling of the racial state and adoption of neoliberal policies. Breaking away from parochial exceptionalism, this places South Africa within the recent history of capitalism and contributes to international debates on the consequences of global structural shifts since the 1970s.

Labour reform sent structurally vulnerable white workers in search of new ways to safeguard their race and class interests in a rapidly changing world. This chapter examines how the MWU negotiated South Africa’s long transition to majority rule, from the late 1970s to the union’s centenary in 2002 when it was re-established as Solidarity. This period saw the trade union acquire new leadership, reposition itself as a social movement involved in labour and civil rights issues, and engage overtly in cultural politics. It also expanded its membership to include white-collar and professional workers. The discursive shifts accompanying these organisational changes reveal how expressions of entitlement, rights, and victimhood centred on citizenship, and experiences of loss, humiliation, anxiety, and a lack of recognition shifted from being expressed in terms of class to being expressed in terms of culture and race. Reflecting global shifts towards identity politics and civil society-based action, this facilitated the merger of white working-class responses to the dismantling of the racial state merged with the post-1994 ‘identity struggles’ of the white, specifically Afrikaner, minority. Hence the MWU’s ‘reinvention’ as the social movement Solidarity represented the merger of cross-class Afrikaner experiences and the formation of a new post-apartheid social alliance.

The National Arts Festival (NAF) in Grahamstown – now Makhanda – is South Africa’s largest, longest-lasting, and most prestigious festival. Although other post-apartheid festivals have launched new work, only NAF hosts African, European, and American work alongside local fare mostly in English and in national languages such as Xhosa, Zulu, or Afrikaans. It has also developed training and employment to offset inequality in the Eastern Cape. While these endeavours to enrich artistic practice, please audiences, and ensure the well-being of ordinary citizens are praiseworthy, NAF sponsors do not fully acknowledge the history of this inequity, which dates from Grahamstown’s founding in 1812 and extends through Anglophile pageants challenging Afrikaner cultural dominance but not the political economy of apartheid in the mid-twentieth century to initially cautious genteel efforts to diversify the festival in the 1980s, which provoked anti-apartheid boycotts. Despite advances since the 1990s, systematic representation of South Africa’s many cultural forms – from African variety through testimonial theatre and township musicals to performance art – was achieved only in the twenty-first century.

District Six has been the site for imprinting new South African imaginaries onto real estate development, through new forms of compromise and accommodation. As attachments to inner city land have been asserted through land restitution or declarations of its historic significance, these claims have been contained through planning agendas that have prioritised mixed-use development, speculation and gentrification. As the state tries to imprint a development framework fragmented between themed environments of land restitution, commerce and the business of property, the District Six Museum has contested the field of memory, with new approaches to redefining citizenship in the post-apartheid city. Alongside civic forums, the museum has challenged the projects of urban regeneration, renewal and orderly citizenship that the state has inaugurated, demonstrating that social cohesion and urban reconstruction need to be based upon memory work, especially about the social experience of those whose material traces apartheid sought to destroy.

This chapter considers whether there is a trade-off between growth and equality, as economists sometimes assert, differentiating between vertical inequality (among individuals) and horizontal inequality (among groups). Most evidence challenges the supposed trade-off, suggesting greater equality increases growth, especially sustained growth. Inequality among individuals tends to limit human resources, while inequality among groups can lead to violent conflict, and both constrain growth. Greater equality also supports other desirable objectives, including better nutrition, less crime, and better health. The impact of growth on equality is analysed. This depends on how far earnings are spread via employment; and the redistributionary effects of tax and government expenditure. Labour-intensive activities tend to improve distribution, while capital-intensive ones, heavy reliance on minerals for exports and rising skill requirements tend to worsen it. For horizontal inequality, the impact of growth varies according to group location, economic specialization and policies, illustrated by the experience of Ghana, Peru, Malaysia and Northern Ireland. The chapter surveys policies likely to improve vertical and horizontal distribution, with examples drawn from many countries. Finally, the chapter considers the political conditions needed to support equalising policies.