Paper short abstract:

This paper examines the production of localised strategies of change and ideas of rights, freedom, community, conflict and equality. It also highlights their relation to national political practices. The paper focuses on the Vaal Triangle in South Africa and pays particular attention to the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

This paper examines the role of localised conflicts in the Vaal Triangle, South Africa, in shaping locally generated ideas about appropriate political strategies to achieve change. Such localised conflicts, despite being within the realm of broader political dynamics, exhibited a certain contingency that differentiated them from those of other areas. They have to be understood beyond a master narrative of struggle that has come to dominate contemporary discourses of the past.

The paper pays particular attention to the 1980s. The everyday experiences of local actors during this period were vital in shaping understandings of rights, community, conflict, equality and freedom that infused the liberation struggle with its content. While economic and political structures did not shape political, cultural and social identities in any deterministic way, they certainly set the ground for such everyday experiences, which were at the core of the formation of new subjectivities. The way local communities imagined freedom and a post-apartheid nation intersected with ideologies and discourses of the liberation movements but cannot be reduced to them. Thus the disjunction between localised strategies and expectations of change and political agendas at the national level have at times led to uneasy and contending relations.

The socio-economic struggles for better services and living conditions, which formed part of popular protests in the 1980s, have produced few tangible results in the region. To contextualise contemporary popular protests, an understanding of the content and meaning of past political practices and discourses is inevitable.