Rethinking South Africa's Transition: From Transformative to Mainstream Approaches to Participatory Development

By the mid-1980s black township activists from across South Africa had risen up in an unprecedented manner to delegitimize and challenge the apartheid state. By the end of 1985, a new era in politics emerged in Alexandra, a small and densely populated township North East of Johannesburg, under the ideology of ‘people's power’. Perhaps more than any other place in the country, the Alexandra Civic Organisation's (ACO's) ideology of ‘people's power’ was underlined by a socialist and participatory approach to solving local problems and resisting apartheid, and these politics quickly became deeply embedded in the community. The dawn of a new democratic dispensation in 1994 meant that the practices could have evolved into a transformative application of participation in development that would improve the lives of the previously marginalised majority. Many therefore hoped that these traditions of participation would be nurtured by the post-apartheid government, but this did not happen. By paying particular attention to the height of ‘people's power’, which offered a unique and radical approach to the practice of participation, this article argues that authors have not paid adequate attention to the decline of a particular kind of civic participation and the mainstream version of participation and model of citizenship that has been adopted by the ANC government.