Paper short abstract:

How do ordinary city dwellers build their political identity as citizen in Angola and South Africa? This paper presents comparative ethnographies led in Luanda and Cape Town to highlight the intricacy between official spaces of citizenship and pragmatic political tactics on the ground.

Paper long abstract:

In South Africa, the Rainbow Nation is associated to the Struggle against apartheid. The - often illegal - resistance organized from below in the cities during the 1980s has become an essential myth in building the New South Africa, even in the city of Cape Town where the ANC was repeatedly defeated in local elections. Results from my PhD led in Cape Town in former 'African' and 'Colored' communities show how the collective narrative of the Liberation infuses individual memories and structures contemporaneous interpretations of urban citizenship beyond partisan allegiances. Nevertheless, what Henri Lefebvre has called the 'citadin-citoyen' (city-dweller-and-citizen) remains an abstract figure that is constantly renegotiated through tactics ranging from pragmatic collaboration with the local authorities to continued insurgency and alternative ordering. Ethnographic fieldwork led in a central neighbourhood of Luanda shows on the contrary that in the Angolan context, political manoeuvre is contained within the dominant party. Clientelism might then become the exclusive mode of negotiation to access urban resources.

By building a comparative analysis of Cape Town and Luanda through in-depth interviews of their ordinary residents, this paper aims at questioning what multipartism brings to local democracy. Do recent protests in both cities mean a return to a more direct interpretation of what ctizenship means? Or are they rather the sign of a post-political fragmentation of local identities?