Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid — (2004)

By Belinda Bozzoli

"I can only admire the texture and empirical depth of Bozzoli’s account. It pulls the reader into a story that unfolds chapter by chapter; it creates a kind of awful fascination with how hope and liberation were folded in with cruelty and blindness in South Africa. This book has the potential to create productive controversy.”

Jo Beall — Development Studies Institute, London School of Economics

A compelling study of the origins and trajectory of one of the legendary black uprisings against apartheid, Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid draws on insights gained from the literature on collective action and social movements. It delves into the Alexandra Rebellion of 1986 to reveal its inner workings.

Belinda Bozzoli’s aim is to examine how the residents of Alexandra, a poverty-stricken segregated township in Johannesburg, manipulated and overturned the meanings of space, time, and power in their sequestered world. She explains how they used political theater to convey, stage, and dramatize their struggle and how young and old residents generated differing ideologies and tactics, giving rise to a distinct form of generational politics.

Theatres of Struggle and the End of Apartheid asks the reader to enter into the world of the rebels and to confront the moral complexity and social duress they experienced as they invented new social forms and violently attacked old ones. It is an important study of collective action that will be of great interest to sociologists and to scholars of Africa, particularly to those interested in the antiapartheid struggle.