Research Report Submitted in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in Political Studies University of the Witwatersrand March 2015 / Recent 21st century political developments in South Africa have given rise to debate surrounding a threat to a functioning democracy. New radical political parties, turmoil in the labour sectors, and dysfunctional government policies and activities have made populist tendencies a central aspect of this debate. Populism is an entity oft evoked in a negative light and rhetoric in this debate. It is associated with demagogues and the ‘uncontrollable’ urges of the masses that would be let loose upon society given the chance, destroying democracy in the process. It is the aim of this paper to argue the opposite. By expanding and contributing to the theoretical literature on populism, and through the analysis of empirical evidence – the Western Cape farm worker’s strikes and the Marikana strikes and subsequent massacre of 2012 –in South Africa this research report seeks to fill a gap in the conceptualisation and practical characterisation of populism in our political setting. Can populism be conceptually, theoretically, and empirically utilised to characterise and explain trends in contemporary South African politics and can it be utilised in providing a contextual underpinning for explaining recent events in South African society as a whole? Through the reliance on the theories of Ernesto Laclau and Slavoj Zizek the aim will be to identify the underlying gaps in democratic politics that gives rise to populist movements and through this argument to build and utilise this conception of populism as a positive and effective analytical tool of contemporary South African politics.

In this minithesis I conduct a critical discourse analysis to take on a double-pronged task. On the one hand I explore the social phenomenon of the contestation between supporters of then-ANC deputy president Jacob Zuma and supporters of his rape accuser. The trial, which took place in the Johannesburg High Court between mid-February and early May 2006, stirred intense public interest, both locally and internationally. The performance of thousands of Zuma’s supporters and a far smaller number of gender rights lobby groups, both of whom kept a presence outside the court building throughout the trial, received similar attention. Second, I examine how the Sowetan, a national daily tabloid with a black, middle-class readership, mediated the trial through pictures of the theatre outside the court and letters to the editor. The study is informed by post-Marxist and cultural studies perspectives, both approaches that are concerned with issues of power, ideology and the circulation of meaning within specific sociocultural contexts. A rudimentary thematic content analysis draws out some of the main themes from the material, while the critical discourse analysis is located within a theoretical framework based on concepts from Laclau & Mouffe’s theory of meaning, which assumes a power struggle between contesting positions seeking to invalidate one another and to either challenge or support existing hegemonies. This is further informed by, first, Laclau’s theorisation of populism, which assumes that diverse groupings can unite under a demagogue’s banner in shared antagonism towards existing power, and second, by concepts from Mamdani’s theorisation of power and resistance in colonial and post-colonial Africa, which explicates three overarching ideological discourses of human rights, social justice and traditional ethnic practices. The study, then, explores how these three discourses were operationalised by the localised contestations over the trial.