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The transformative power of civil society in South Africa: an activist’s perspective on innovative forms of organizing and rights-based practices
Abstract
This essay analyses recent campaigns to fulfil human rights to quality basic education and access to mental health care services, led by SECTION27, a social justice organization in South Africa. It investigates how these campaigns were able to impact on inequality in education and health care and the ways in which they mobilized and empowered communities to demand social justice and drive pro-poor transformation. In particular, it looks at the way SECTION27 used human rights law and the Courts to advance social justice. It records many positive outcomes. But concludes by asking whether, if inequality is enabled by elite power can it only be disabled by people’s power? How can civil society overcome fault-lines in its sustainability, representativity and power structure? It argues that civil society must do more to tackle the systems and not just scratch at the symptoms of a more and more unequal world.
... 43 ( Figure 17.3) Mark Heywood, a civil society activist who has played a central role in both the Treatment Action Campaign and Section27, succinctly outlines what he describes as "An anatomy of new shapes of resistance" in South Africa after the end of apartheid that involves: 44 Heywood writes of how, in spite of the importance of legal proceedings in struggles for social justice, litigation "cannot become the campaign" 45 and for this reason: SECTION27 explored innovative uses of media to mobilize public and political opinion. YouTube videos, a postcard-sending campaign from children of a similar age, roadside posters, a photo exhibition and a mural on a busy street corner leading into central Johannesburg catalyzed public awareness and outrage. ...
This chapter provides a concise history of visual activism in South Africa and focuses on how contemporary artists and activists make use of visual forms to intervene in public space, to document injustice, and to express dissent. The chapter argues that visual activism is best understood as a call to those who look to move from seeing and knowing to acting. Through analyses of works by visual activists Zanele Muholi, Haroon Gunn-Salie, and the Tokolos Stencils Collective, and through engaging with a campaign created by the social justice movement Section27, the essay shows how such work draws attention to homophobia and sexual violence; impunity for crimes against humanity; and ongoing inequality in the aftermath of apartheid. The essay also considers what occurs when visual activist works are detached from collective mobilizing and circulate within the neo-liberal art economy, producing forms of atomized solidarity.
... 43 ( Figure 17.3) Mark Heywood, a civil society activist who has played a central role in both the Treatment Action Campaign and Section27, succinctly outlines what he describes as "An anatomy of new shapes of resistance" in South Africa after the end of apartheid that involves: 44 Heywood writes of how, in spite of the importance of legal proceedings in struggles for social justice, litigation "cannot become the campaign" 45 and for this reason: SECTION27 explored innovative uses of media to mobilize public and political opinion. YouTube videos, a postcard-sending campaign from children of a similar age, roadside posters, a photo exhibition and a mural on a busy street corner leading into central Johannesburg catalyzed public awareness and outrage. ...
This chapter provides a concise history of visual activism in South Africa and focuses on how contemporary artists and activists make use of visual forms to intervene in public space, to document injustice, and to express dissent. The chapter argues that visual activism is best understood as a call to those who look to move from seeing and knowing to acting. Through analyses of works by visual activists Zanele Muholi, Haroon Gunn-Salie, and the Tokolos Stencils Collective, and through engaging with a campaign created by the social justice movement Section27, the essay shows how such work draws attention to homophobia and sexual violence; impunity for crimes against humanity; and ongoing inequality in the aftermath of apartheid. The essay also considers what occurs when visual activist works are detached from collective mobilizing and circulate within the neo-liberal art economy, producing forms of atomized solidarity.
... The practical implications of such conditions are, for example, high noise levels which makes studying difficult for youth in school . Despite some promising relief offered by formal education institutes, the history of violence seriously obstructs schooling in South Africa in fulfilling its mandate (Chipkin & Meny-Gibert, 2013;Heywood, 2020). In Delft, most children at primary and secondary schools have experienced some form of violence while being at school, most commonly threats of violence, robbery, and attacks. ...
Harmony is recognized as fundamental to being and functioning well in philosophical traditions and empirical research globally and in Africa. The aim of this study was to explore and describe harmony as a quality of happiness in South Africa (N = 585) and Ghana (N = 420). Using a qualitative descriptive research design, participants’ responses to an open-ended question from the Eudaimonic-Hedonic Happiness Investigation (EHHI, Delle Fave et al., Soc Indic Res 100:185–207, 2011) on what happiness meant to them were coded according to the formalized EHHI coding manual. Responses that were assigned any of the following codes were considered: codes from the “harmony/balance” category in the “psychological definitions” life domain; and codes from any other life domain containing the words “harmony”, “balance”, or “peace”. This resulted in 222 verbatim responses from South Africa and 80 from Ghana that were analyzed using content analysis to get a sense of the experiential texture of harmony as a quality of happiness. Findings showed that happiness was often expressed as harmony and balance within and between intrapersonal, interpersonal, transcendental, and universal levels of functioning, with wholeness, interconnectedness, and synergy implied. These findings, resonating with philosophical reflections on harmony from Africa and elsewhere, suggest that harmony as a quality of happiness is essentially holistic and contextually embedded and that context-sensitive interdisciplinary approaches to theory building and intervention development pertaining to harmony are needed locally and globally.
... The practical implications of such conditions are, for example, high noise levels which makes studying difficult for youth in school . Despite some promising relief offered by formal education institutes, the history of violence seriously obstructs schooling in South Africa in fulfilling its mandate (Chipkin & Meny-Gibert, 2013;Heywood, 2020). In Delft, most children at primary and secondary schools have experienced some form of violence while being at school, most commonly threats of violence, robbery, and attacks. ...
Positive mental health, and the validity of its assessment instruments, are largely unexplored in the Ghanaian context. This study examined the factor structure of the Twi version of the Mental Health Continuum-Short Form and explored the prevalence of positive mental health in a sample of rural Ghanaian adults (N = 444). A bifactor exploratory structural equation modelling (ESEM) model fit the data better than competing models (confirmatory factor analysis [CFA], bifactor CFA, and ESEM models). We found a high omega reliability coefficient for the general positive mental health factor (ω = .97) and marginal reliability scores for the emotional (ω = .51) and social well-being (ω = .57) subscales, but a low reliability score for the psychological well-being subscale (ω = .41). Findings support the existence of a general mental health factor, and confirm the underlying three-dimensional structure of mental health, but suggest that caution should be applied when interpreting subscale scores, especially for the psychological well-being subscale. Based on Keyes’s criteria for the categorical diagnosis of the presence of positive mental health, 25.5% of the sample were flourishing, with 74.5% functioning at suboptimal levels (31.1% languishing, 41.4% with moderate mental health) and may benefit from contextually relevant positive psychological interventions, which may also buffer against psychopathology.
... The practical implications of such conditions are, for example, high noise levels which makes studying difficult for youth in school . Despite some promising relief offered by formal education institutes, the history of violence seriously obstructs schooling in South Africa in fulfilling its mandate (Chipkin & Meny-Gibert, 2013;Heywood, 2020). In Delft, most children at primary and secondary schools have experienced some form of violence while being at school, most commonly threats of violence, robbery, and attacks. ...
Psychology is concerned with human behaviour, therefore all psychologies are contextually-embedded and culturally informed. A movement towards globalising psychology would invariably diminish the localised socio-cultural situatedness of psychology, and instead seek to advance a dominant Euro-American centred psychology even in regions where such applications do not fit. The emergence of strong voices, and theoretically grounded and empirically supported positions from the global South in general and sub-Saharan Africa in particular, in studies of well-being allows for the opportunity to explore and describe an Africa(n) centred positive psychology. Acknowledging the limitations of cross-cultural psychological approaches, which have encouraged the uncritical transportation of Euro-American centred concepts and values, in this chapter we utilise assumptions from critical, cultural and African psychology to present our initial thoughts about a culturally embedded, socially relevant and responsive, and context respecting Africa(n) centred positive psychology. This challenge warrants consideration of early contributions to the study of well-being, its current data-driven positivist tendency, as well as African worldviews grounded in interdependence, collectivism, relatedness, harmony with nature, and spirituality. For an Africa(n) centred positive psychology, it is also essential to consider questions of epistemology, ways of knowing about the world and the human condition, context respecting knowledge, and theory building. Drawing on current scholarly evidence in sub-Saharan Africa, which emphasises relationality and societal values and norms shaping experiences of well-being, we propose future directions and discuss implications for empirical research and theory building within positive psychology which seeks to centre Africa and African experiences.
... The Esidimeni tragedy is arguably the most serious human rights abuse scandal to have occurred in post-apartheid South Africa, a country that enjoys a liberal constitution and bill of rights. Given its significance for questions of governance and human rights in South Africa and further afield, a growing literature is exploring what occurred and how it could have occurred, mainly from the perspective of human rights, governance, and legal compliance (see, for example, Dhai, 2017aDhai, , 2017bFerlito & Dhai, 2018;Heywood, 2020;Ornellas & Engelbrecht, 2018). Though the Esidimeni deaths are in themselves tragic and shocking, it is also unfortunately the case that the Esidimeni story has parallels elsewhere. ...
The chapters in this collection are reflections of the intellectual, emotional and day-to-day experiences of professional staff engaged in academic development. They provide the reader with glimpses of how academic developers at one South African university are continuously shaping their identities through sense-making processes, how they creatively apply different theoretical approaches to both analysing and informing their work and what their views are of the practical and systemic challenges facing higher education. As such this book expands on as well as challenges the dominant ways of thinking about academic development and academic developers in higher education.
... The practical implications of such conditions are, for example, high noise levels which makes studying difficult for youth in school . Despite some promising relief offered by formal education institutes, the history of violence seriously obstructs schooling in South Africa in fulfilling its mandate (Chipkin & Meny-Gibert, 2013;Heywood, 2020). In Delft, most children at primary and secondary schools have experienced some form of violence while being at school, most commonly threats of violence, robbery, and attacks. ...
Child marriage has been identified as a violation of human rights and an obstacle to promoting the development goals concerning gender, health and education. All these impacts undermine the development of the girl child. Despite the potential for negative outcomes, the presence of intrinsic and extrinsic resources can buffer the adverse effects (e.g., psychological, physical and economic impact) of early marriage. This study employed a qualitative exploratory, descriptive design to explore and describe protective resources utilised by married girls in the Northern region of Ghana to cope with the challenges in their marriage and to promote positive outcomes. Using semi-structured interviews, data was collected from 21 married girls who were aged between 12 and 19 years. Findings, from a thematic analysis of data, showed that intrinsic resources that promoted positive outcomes included possession of resilience attitudes, the use of help-seeking and active coping, and in some instances avoidance coping for problems they perceived as unsolvable. Extrinsic resources included interpersonal support networks, however, participants reported limited access to community and NGO support, which were also identified as protective resources. Policy makers and clinicians should consider a social justice approach in evaluating and recommending protective resources to girls in early marriages when working to promote their well-being. In so doing, attention should be placed on making external support systems accessible to married girls.
While the contribution of research conducted within positive psychology is acknowledged, this sub-discipline of psychology is criticised for its “limited utility” in the South African context. The researcher’s continuous involvement and knowledge from practice and practical field experiences obtained from more than 10 years of connecting with community members living in a high-risk context opened doors for meaningful and engaged research. This chapter describes experiences and implementation outcomes based on positive psychology in a high-risk community in the South African context. Drawing on various well-being research studies conducted within the selected high-risk community, research findings are described to illustrate the outcomes of the implementation of a sustainable well-being programme, its progress over time, and lessons learned in the process. The well-being of children, families, and schools in a Western Cape high-risk community is seriously challenged as they are continuously exposed to a “hostile environment”. While the negative effects of poverty and many social ills are confirmed by research, the need for contextually appropriate positive psychology interventions to mitigate the psychological consequences of economic deprivation is clear. Engaging with vulnerable groups is important to enable the generation of well-being interventions at the community level in the South African context.
If the right-remedy gap is an inevitable feature of constitutional law, it is all the more so for constitutional economic and social rights. Yet such rights – to have access, for example, to health care, education, social security, housing, food, water, sanitation, or other good or service or opportunity deemed fundamental to human freedom and dignity – are not uniform in the remedial gaps that occur. This article introduces the orientations of holism and separability to demarcate the distinctive challenges of rights adjudication across different policy domains. A holistic understanding of economic and social rights points to the institutional challenges faced by courts in reviewing socio-economic laws and policies in general. A separable analysis of discrete economic and social rights helps to clarify the remedial constraints of each. These effects are demonstrated by the remedies ordered by courts with respect to identified infringements of South Africa’s constitutional rights to housing, health care, social security, and education.
Access to justice is not a reality for most South Africans. While it is not the only factor, a significant part of this situation is due to the high cost of legal services. This article outlines and justifies a research method to assess legal costs for the South African and other populations. The proposed research method divides the population into three bands based on economic resources: the poor, the wealthy, and those in between. In each of these three bands, the article preliminarily surveys the costs currently pertaining to legal services in civil justice matters in South Africa.
The Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) has been recognised as one of the most effective social movements in post-apartheid South Africa. Among other things, it is responsible for the world’s largest programme to provide anti-retroviral treatment to people with HIV through the public health system. This article looks at the lessons TAC learned from the trade union movement as it sought to build a mass movement of the poor around the human right to access essential medicines for millions of people infected with HIV. It explores how TAC sought to build an alliance with the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) and its affiliates, and the vital role that an independent COSATU played in supporting AIDS activism and using its social weight to support campaigns for AIDS treatment. Finally it looks at what trade unions can learn from social movements and explains why an effective alliance between unions and social movements is so essential for pro-poor reform in the twenty-first century.
This article explores the possibilities and pitfalls of various methods of human rights advocacy in post-apartheid South Africa. It does so through following the personal journey of the author, first as a socialist in the anti-apartheid movement and later as a leading human rights activist in some of the most successful civil society organizations to emerge in the post-apartheid period. The journey begins in the pre-constitutional period in 1994 (the year South Africa had its first democratic election) and continues through to 2019. It examines the evolution of human rights practice, particularly in relation to access to treatment for HIV/AIDS and the realization of socioeconomic rights to health care services and basic education. It measures its achievements against the discourse of socialists, particularly their critique of using law, the courts and human rights in the quest for equality. It shows how South Africa has a long tradition of human rights activism that stretches back to the colonial and apartheid periods. However, making human rights justiciable in South Africa’s 1996 Constitution was a game-changer that has enabled tangible victories to be achieved through a combination of litigation and social mobilization. Despite this the author believes that this period of advance may now be reaching its limits and he argues that human rights practice now needs a much deeper consideration of its command over matters of economy and private (corporate) power if it is to retain its credibility in twenty-first century struggles for equality and social justice. The article ends with some suggestions about how this can be done.
In December 2015, the Supreme Court of Appeal (‘SCA’) in its judgment in the case of Minister of Basic Education v Basic Education for All held that every learner is entitled to a textbook in every subject at the commencement of the academic year. This article discusses and analyses the judgment. In particular, it examines the contribution of the judgment to the doctrine of transformative constitutionalism as evidenced by the SCA’s approach to the interpretation of the rights to basic education and equality, respectively. It discusses the reaffirmation of the principle of the duty to budget in South Africa’s evolving socio-economic rights jurisprudence and finally it discusses the choice of remedy in the judgment.
Much has been written about the global convergence on constitutional supremacy, and the corresponding rise of an apparently universal constitutional discourse, primarily visible in the context of rights. In this Paper, we examine the global constitutional homogeneity claim with respect to economic and social rights. Based on a new and unique dataset that identifies the status of sixteen distinct economic and social rights in the world's constitutions (195 in total), we make four arguments. First, although economic and social rights (ESRs) have grown increasingly common in national constitutions, not all ESRs are equally widespread. Whereas a right to education is so common as to be practically universal, a right to food and water is still very rare. Second, constitutions accord ESRs different statuses, or strengths. More than some one-third of countries identify all economic and social rights as justiciable, another third identify some ESRs as aspirational and some as justiciable, and the last third identify ESRs as aspirational or entrench fewer than two. Third, legal tradition-whether a country has a tradition of civil, common, Islamic, or customary law-is a strong predictor of whether a constitution will have economic and social rights and whether those rights will be justiciable. Fourth, whereas regional differences partly confound the explanatory power of legal traditions, region and legal tradition retain an independent effect on constitutional entrenchment of ESR. We conclude by suggesting that despite the prevalence of economic and social rights in national constitutions, as of 2013 there is still considerable variance with respect to the formal status, scope and nature of such rights. Because the divergence reflects lasting determinants such as legal tradition and region, it is likely to persist.
The most important book yet from the author of the international bestseller The Shock Doctrine, a brilliant explanation of why the climate crisis challenges us to abandon the core “free market” ideology of our time, restructure the global economy, and remake our political systems.In short, either we embrace radical change ourselves or radical changes will be visited upon our physical world. The status quo is no longer an option. In This Changes Everything Naomi Klein argues that climate change isn’t just another issue to be neatly filed between taxes and health care. It’s an alarm that calls us to fix an economic system that is already failing us in many ways. Klein meticulously builds the case for how massively reducing our greenhouse emissions is our best chance to simultaneously reduce gaping inequalities, re-imagine our broken democracies, and rebuild our gutted local economies. She exposes the ideological desperation of the climate-change deniers, the messianic delusions of the would-be geoengineers, and the tragic defeatism of too many mainstream green initiatives. And she demonstrates precisely why the market has not—and cannot—fix the climate crisis but will instead make things worse, with ever more extreme and ecologically damaging extraction methods, accompanied by rampant disaster capitalism. Klein argues that the changes to our relationship with nature and one another that are required to respond to the climate crisis humanely should not be viewed as grim penance, but rather as a kind of gift—a catalyst to transform broken economic and cultural priorities and to heal long-festering historical wounds. And she documents the inspiring movements that have already begun this process: communities that are not just refusing to be sites of further fossil fuel extraction but are building the next, regeneration-based economies right now. Can we pull off these changes in time? Nothing is certain. Nothing except that climate change changes everything. And for a very brief time, the nature of that change is still up to us.
South Africa's 1996 Constitution is widely lauded as the world's most liberal Constitution, yet the document was marred by its context: democratisation alongside the accumulation of excessive corporate power and the adoption of neoliberal public policy. The 1990s transition period generated, in turn, even worse inequality, poverty, unemployment and uneven development than during apartheid. The Constitution thus became a distraction in vital battles by poor and working people, including the first use of its celebrated socio-economic rights for unsuccessful interventions in healthcare (kidney dialysis) (1997), housing (2000) and water (2009). On the one hand, defensive courtroom postures were maintained with the document's help (e.g. anti-eviction injunctions) and occasional offensive victories were registered (e.g. AIDS medicines for pregnant women to halt HIV transmission to babies). But the overall impact was to direct those entering a legal alleyway with great expectations, into a cul-de-sac where satisfactory exit was blocked by property rights. The only way out has been much more explicit direct action, instead of community activists wasting further time, effort, resources and strategic credibility promoting the Constitution.
This article summarizes the experience and results of a campaign for access to medicines for HIV in South Africa, led by the
Treatment Action Campaign (TAC) between 1998 and 2008. It illustrates how the TAC mobilized people to campaign for the right
to health using a combination of human rights education, HIV treatment literacy, demonstration, and litigation. As a result
of these campaigns, the TAC was able to reduce the price of medicines, prevent hundreds of thousands of HIV-related deaths,
but also to force significant additional resources into the health system and towards the poor. The article asks whether the
method of the TAC has a wider application for human rights campaigns and, particularly, whether the protection of the right
to health in law, and the obligation that it be progressively realized by the State, provides an opportunity to advance human
rights practice.
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