The story of African independence is well known. By contrast, South African liberation---fairly recently achieved and under conditions quite different from those that shaped anti-colonial struggle in the '50s and '60s---frames a set of questions about political transformation from the perspective of often ignored peoples and places. As such, the dissertation is concerned to refine the definition of what constitutes "politics," addressing populist struggle in South Africa in order to understand the contemporary postcolonial moment and the new stakes against which older notions of moral vindication for apartheid wrongs are now being measured. This is at once an historical problem and a problem of historical narration. For as the past is recuperated and revised, the "how" and "why" of the country's victory over repression emerges as a mostly unambiguous tale of clashes between pro- and anti-regime forces.; Beginning in Cape Town's shantytowns, the dissertation proposes a re-reading of the historical record for the past quarter century. Concentrating less on the activities of formal political organizations such as the African National Congress and the United Democratic Front, the thesis places the squatter struggles in Crossroads and other shack areas at the center of South Africa's unfolding drama of liberation.; If apartheid, both historically and analytically, opens the dissertation, neoliberalism emerges as a critical counterpoint in explaining political reform and its limits. For as early nation-building efforts quickly ceded to economic liberalization and the collapse of the social reform agenda, ordinary South Africans withdrew from the forms of popular protest that characterized prior decades, and moved to consult diviners, healers, witchdoctors, and ancestral spirits. These have become central means of resolving the many hardships that democratization has failed to address and the ones it has introduced.; Finally, the dissertation tries to show the ways in which the new and the old South Africa can learn from each other; and in as much as Cape Town's squatter areas remain a very real problem they embody a central paradox---"everything has changed and nothing has changed."
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