The South African Communist Party and the negotiated transition to democracy

The relative success of the South African negotiated transition to a non-racial democracy in the early 1990s owed much to popular protagonism at both national and local levels. In this respect, the South African negotiations bucked the dominant transitions to democracy literature of the time. This literature argued that success required behind-closed-doors ‘elite-pacting’ between contesting ‘moderates’, sidelining ‘radicals’ and their mobilised constituencies. The South African Communist Party played a central role in propagating an alternative, people-driven negotiation process. The key power bases for popular pro-democracy mobilisation were the black townships on the periphery of apartheid-era towns and cities. There was an antagonistic but reciprocal dependence between the capitalist class and these proletarianised locations with their armies of daily migrant workers. The township political stay-away and boycotts of ‘white’ businesses were key weapons of negotiation that underpinned the mid 1990s transition to a non-racial democracy.