MAY 1996 · VOLUME 17 · NUMBER 5

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B O O K    N O T E S

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The growth of South Africa's militant labor movement was matched by equally widespread, but less publicized internationally, community organization. Community groups, known as civics, sprouted throughout the country.

Mzwanele Mayekiso, in Township Politics, offers a first-hand account of the evolution of one important civic, the Alexandra Civic Organization, from the height of the anti-apartheid movement through the worst of the armed battles between the white-backed Inkatha group (a Zulu ethnic movement) and progressive sympathizers of the African National Congress, to the present struggle to implement a local people-centered development model.

Alexandra is a particularly poignant township to be the subject of a case study. A polluted, crowded and dangerous slum with minimal infrastructure, it is located in the center of Johannesburg's richest white neighborhoods. Mayekiso begins the book with a narrated "walking tour" of the township, pointing out a peanut seller who tries to support his family of eight on earnings of about $4 a day, the hostels where factory workers from the countryside live in prison-like conditions and a shebeen (an unlicensed bar).

Mayekiso moved to Alexandra in 1985, at the age of 21. Popular protests were growing in number, a successful bus boycott had recently been completed, a proposed rent increase defeated. Mayekiso quickly immersed himself in community politics, and became an organizer for the Alexandra Action Committee. The level of local organization was extraordinary, extending to the yard level, to include the various families living on a single plot of land.

In the mid-1980s, the Alexandra Action Committee led a hard-fought campaign to make the township ungovernable, to assert popular power against the apartheid regime's military power. Mayekiso ably describes the day-to-day organizing and protest activities of the Alexandra Action Committee, and conveys a sense of what life was like in the tumult of the anti-apartheid struggle.

The struggle soon landed Mayekiso in jail, where he stayed from 1986 to 1989. Mayekiso and a handful of others were charged with treason, a capital offense. As the conclusion of one of South Africa's highest profile trials, Mayekiso and his co-defendants were found not guilty.

A new civic organization, the Alexandra Civic Organization (ACO), was inaugurated at the end of 1989, and Mayekiso became its organizing officer. As it eventually became clear that the apartheid regime was going to be dismantled, the ACO shifted the focus of community agitation from protesting apartheid to economic development. It encountered a number of failures, including a failed effort to develop a community-controlled bus line to provide transport from the township to Johannesburg workplaces and unsuccessful attempts to broker various deals with big business to fund housing projects in the township.

In post-apartheid South Africa, these economic challenges remain the central tasks facing the ACO. "So far, our economic situation and the physical environment in which we suffer have not improved much," Mayekiso writes. It is hard to imagine the ACO overcoming the apartheid legacy on its own. Without a more active interventionist role by the national government, prospects are not bright for a better future for Alexandra.

Still, there is a hopefulness to Township Politics. The civics played a critical role, after all, in defeating an entrenched, superexploitative regime, and succeeded in building democratic institutions.

For those interested in democratic experimentation, community organization or life in South Africa, Township Politics is a good and important read. Mayekiso devotes some attention to defending the civics from academic critics (some of whom criticized the civics for failing to develop a class-based movement), and readers outside of these circles of debate may find this discussion uninteresting. But the heart of the book is a descriptive and analytic account of the civics movement in Alexandra, a compelling presentation deserving wide attention.

-- Robert Weissman