Time will tell whether the rite of passage represented by the abrupt termination of Mbeki's mandate a few months before the elections is going to convert into a significant change of political orientation. As we go to (the electronic version of) press, we are witnessing the change of ownership of a state apparatus that, after the defeat of Mbeki's faction at the 2007 Polokwane Congress of the ANC and the recent national elections, is now firmly in the hands of a new political coalition fronted by controversial president Jacob Zuma, and comprising those Left alliance partners that led the charge against the Mbekites at the Polokwane showdown -namely, the South Africa Communist Party (SACP) and the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU).
Let's start then, briefly, with the current political conjuncture. But if this is the longer temporality that frames our contributors' different angles of observation, Mediations readers will also be probably curious about South Africa's more immediate political context -that is, the recent convulsions in South African party politics, which are most visibly manifested in the split from the ANC and the launch of a new centrist political formation, the Congress of the People (COPE), by former president Thabo Mbeki's supporters (minus the leader himself).
#Powermail chimp error bad org error full
The expectations and desires first induced by the demise of the apartheid system of institutionalized racial discrimination, as well as those embodied by the emergence of a composite ensemble of post-apartheid social movements, are thus pitched vis-à-vis a political dispensation that has combined the introduction of a non-racial democracy with the full insertion of the "new South Africa" into the globally hegemonic (recent setbacks notwithstanding) neoliberal macroeconomic framework. At bottom, this translates into both subjecting to critique and, at the same time, displacing the various exceptionalist national narratives that continue to dominate local mainstream political discourse.
#Powermail chimp error bad org error series
In this dossier, the second in the new series of Mediations, we offer a collection of interventions that critically situate South Africa's long transition within a protracted post-apartheid moment.