Slow Activism in Fast Times: Reflections on the Politics of Media Spectacles after Apartheid

Academics and journalists in South Africa routinely reproduce stark oppositions between ‘radical’ social movements that embrace the spectacular revolutionary politics of the barricades, and those that work within the ‘reformist’ logic of the law, liberalism, constitutional democracy and the bureaucratic state. These strikingly different activist strategies also seem to manifest themselves as contrasts between the politics of the instant media spectacle and the patient, long-term organisational work of ‘slow activism’. At one level, the slow and patient styles of activism of South African civil society organisations such as the Treatment Action Campaign (TAC), Social Justice Coalition (SJC) and Equal Education (EE) can indeed be contrasted with the spectacle of the burning barricades typically associated with ‘service delivery protests’ and the illegal wildcat strikes that spread throughout the mining and transport sectors in 2012. However, this contrast can also be misleading. By focusing on the case study of the Social Justice Coalition in Khayelitsha in Cape Town, this paper shows that, notwithstanding these apparent differences of political style and repertoire, ‘reformist’ social movements are not averse to using media-friendly spectacles of civil disobedience campaigns to highlight service delivery problems, structural inequalities and social injustices. The SJC case study is specifically concerned with how this particular organisation has drawn on a variety of activist traditions that use media campaigns and the politics of the spectacle as part of a rich repertoire of modes of mass mobilisation.