Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
16 - Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
from Part 2 - Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 21 April 2018
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Foreword
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: Politics is thought, thought is real, people think
- Part 1 Thinking political sequences: From African history to African historical political sequences
- Part 2 Opening up the thought of politics in Africa today: Exceeding the limits of sociology: Beyond representation
- 9 Theoretical introduction: Social representation, modes of rule and political prescriptions
- 10 Marxism and the politics of representation: The ‘agrarian question’ and the limits of political economy – class, nation and the party-state
- 11 Thinking beyond representation, acting beyond representation: Accounting for worker subjectivities in South Africa
- 12 Renaming the state in Africa today
- 13 Domains of state politics and systemic violence: The concept of ‘uncivil society’
- 14 The domain of civil society and its politics
- 15 The domain of traditional society and its politics
- 16 Towards a politics of solidarity: Feminist contributions
- Conclusion: Reclaiming the domain of freedom
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Toute vie (humaine) est une vie. [Every (human) life is a life.]
– The Hunters’ Oath or Mandé Charter, 1222Tout moun se moun men ce pa memn moun. [Every person is a person even if they are not the same person.]
– Haitian popular saying, 1804Unyawo alunampumulo. [A person is a person wherever they may come from.]
– Abahlali baseMjondolo, 2014THINKING BEYOND THE NEO-COLONIAL
To conclude Part 2 of this book, I wish to note that, despite the limitations of human rights discourse, which are sometimes admitted in the liberal literature, it is regularly assumed that these are of unquestioned benefit in transforming ‘tradition’, in enabling the previously ‘rightless’ under tradition to ‘acquire human rights’ and thus to assert their humanity in the face of a presumed ‘state of nature’ which, in the famous Hobbesian formulation, is seen as ‘nasty, brutish and short’. The assumption that the character of liberal democracy today is liberatory and universal relative to tradition, which is seen as invariably particularistic, is reflected, implicitly or explicitly, in a number of interrelated discourses on the continuing relevance of tradition in modern society, particularly in South Africa, where the idea often dominates feminist politics in relation to tradition. It is such thinking, when associated with the capacity to deploy power, that lies at the heart of the neo-colonial conception of ‘the responsibility to protect’. On the other hand, alternative feminist positions – reacting to women's oppression ‘from within’, so to speak – point in the direction of recognising popular ‘voice’. I wish to briefly address these arguments here.
At issue particularly in South Africa is the role of traditional institutions, such as the chieftaincy, in a modern secular state. Also important is the issue of women's ‘rights to land’ under ‘traditional tenure’ in conditions of legally prescribed liberal gender equality. Both of these issues are regularly the subjects of debate within liberal- democratic discourse in post-apartheid South Africa. They seem to have relatively ‘obvious’ answers from a democratic perspective, yet in both cases I suggest that such ‘obviousness’ is superficial and ultimately misleading.
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- Information
- Thinking Freedom in AfricaToward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics, pp. 521 - 531Publisher: Wits University PressPrint publication year: 2016