The Road to Soweto

Julian Brown’s analysis of the pre-history of the Soweto uprising seeks to break new ground. He confronts what he calls a ‘consensus account’ of the rebellion. In this depiction, the uprising ended a decade of quiescence and was the product of a generational revolt prompted primarily by immediate and localised experience. Earlier historians of the revolt have also located the rebellion in distinct insurgent traditions, shaped by generations of classroom mutinies in black South African schools (Baruch Hirson), or influenced by the clandestine networks of organisations suppressed in the previous decade (Paul Brickhill and Alan Brooks), or nurtured in a tradition of race-conscious nativist nationalism (Gail Gerhart). Brown’s argument is at odds with these interpretations for two reasons. First, he proposes that we need to adjust our idea of what constitutes politics so that we can recognise ‘the repeated interruptions of public order’ (p. 3) that occurred in the decade before the revolt. Here he draws on the ideas of the French philosopher, Jacques Rancière, to represent a wider conception of politics, not limited to organised contention over structures of power, but rather any action, including individual speech, that succeeds in making the social order’s ‘hidden exclusions visible’ (p. 14). Secondly, he is critical of the structuring dichotomies that confine the way South African history is understood, particularly those of race, which blind us to the possibility of ‘apparently separate strands of politics intertwin[ing], shadow[ing] each other’ and becoming ‘bound up in each other’ (p. 16). It is this last proposition that is central to his argument. To make his case, Brown needs to identify actors who may previously have been considered as politically inconsequential, interrupting order in ways that were communally visible and bringing together groups or lineages hitherto considered separate from each other, so as to provide ‘templates’ of action for the insurgents of 1976

Ancient history · Biology · Political science · Resistance (ecology · African studies and sociopolitical issues · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Ecology · History · South African History and Culture