Neither Settler nor Native: The Making and Unmaking of Permanent Minorities

by Mahmood Mamdani

Migrant workers, straddling the urban and the rural, moved between the lash of customary law and the disciplinary hold of civil law, and for that same reason were not fully controlled by either. These groups rejuvenated popular protest and shattered the silence of the 1960s. Despite the obvious differences among them, they made common cause during important actions such as the Durban strikes of 1973. Together they moved the locus of struggle from exiled professional revolutionaries and imprisoned fighters to the popular strata in South Africa’s communities—they brought the struggle back home. They also replaced an aborted guerilla movement with nonviolent agitation, to enormous effect. By acting peacefully, they maintained the moral high ground and distinguished themselves from an obviously violent system of oppression. Although they did not end apartheid on their own, they created the social and political paralysis that forced South Africa’s white rulers to capitulate and, in 1990, open negotiations. The student and worker uprising marked a shift not only in South Africa but in the whole paradigm of liberation struggle, preceding the intifada that shook occupied Palestine in the 1980s and Eastern Europe’s largely nonviolent revolutions of that same decade.