The struggle for transformation in South Africa: unrealised dreams, persistent hopes
South Africa offers a remarkable focal point to explore legacies of liberation, because of the enormity of the task of transforming society to address the legacies of apartheid, and because of the substantial legal, institutional and financial resources available to the government to foster significant change. In contrast to other countries in the region, such as Mozambique and Angola, whose early independence period was shaped by civil war and military intervention by the apartheid regime and the superpowers, South Africa's transition was strongly supported by regional and international actors. Given this backing, the resources available to the government, and the long history of worker and community participation in the country's mass democratic movement, there were high hopes and expectations that the new African National Congress (ANC) government would introduce policies and governing practices that would foster inclusion and address the deep levels of inequality, poverty and violence that characterised society. This has not happened. The 2014 national election, which marked 20 years of democracy in South Africa, confirmed the limited nature of the transformation. As widely predicted, the ANC was able to brush off political scandals, rampant corruption, sluggish economic growth and public protests to win its fifth successive election victory. However, it has not been able to brush off the many protests that manifest themselves throughout the country, in workplaces and communities where the lack of transformation is most keenly felt. The selection of articles in this special issue, we believe, helps to advance our understanding of the nature and complexities of post apartheid democracy in South Africa through contemporary struggles for transformation. While much has been written about the country's transition and the range of problems associated with the ANC's adoption of neo liberalism and related policy reforms, local struggles and resistance have generated less attention. The articles here offer rich insights into processes of governance and resistance, and show that social justice cannot easily be engineered through new institutions in the absence of political will. Apartheid created a society based on inequality and dispossession; little wonder many post1994 political and community based struggles have been framed around socio economic transformation, rights and redress. Demands that basic rights be respected played an important role in the struggle against apartheid, both as a way to critique white minority rule and racial oppression, and as goals for the liberation movement to pursue. Rights have remained one of the most important bases for asserting normative and political claims; labour and social movements have used a rights based discourse to push for the realisation of socio economic advancement, women's groups have fought for gender equality, and new social movements have used equal citizenship rights as the basis to demand land reform and access to basic services, such as water and electricity. In other words, the dreams of a post apartheid South Africa characterised by economic and racial justice have not died, though in the absence of a national process of socio economic transformation, they have fractured into thousands of localised struggles.