In much of Africa, independence came during the 1950s and 1960s. But in Southern Africa, liberation was delayed — and often more bitterly contested. Only in 1975 did Mozambique and Angola break free from Portuguese colonialism. Zimbabwe followed in 1980, Namibia in 1990, and South Africa in 1994. These were hard-won victories, paid for in blood and achieved after decades of sacrifice, imprisonment, exile and war.
Southern Africa’s liberation parties have largely retained state power. Frelimo in Mozambique, the MPLA in Angola, Zanu-PF in Zimbabwe, Swapo in Namibia, and the ANC in South Africa, all continue to govern. Yet over time, the moral and political authority once granted by their historic role in defeating colonialism has eroded — the so-called liberation dividend has steadily declined.
Where these movements once promised egalitarian transformation, many have come to embody authoritarianism and elite consolidation. In Angola, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, ruling parties have presided over kleptocratic extraction, personal enrichment and political violence.
Namibia and South Africa followed a different liberation trajectory, shaped more by protracted negotiations rather than the armed seizure of power. But the result has not been dramatically different. Despite democratic constitutions, both countries have seen growing political exclusion, economic inequality and the hollowing out of public institutions. In South Africa, this has included the turn to repression — most notoriously at Marikana in 2012.
As Ronnie Kasrils has observed, reflecting on the compromises made during South Africa’s transition: “In the 1980s, the [Freedom] Charter had been a call for deep structural transformation. At the settlement, key clauses — particularly those calling for the redistribution of land and the sharing of national wealth — were softened or deferred.
While the vote was won, the deeper transformations envisioned in the charter were postponed
— Ronnie Kasrils
“The final settlement preserved existing patterns of private property and accepted a macroeconomic framework shaped in part by global neoliberal pressures. While the vote was won, the deeper transformations envisioned in the charter were postponed.”
The result, Kasrils concludes, is that decades after apartheid ended, “structural inequalities and mass impoverishment remain. The charter’s economic promises have not been fulfilled.”
And as the philosopher Michael Neocosmos has argued, the transition to democracy in South Africa entailed not only a political compromise but a deeper substitution of one mode of politics for another. During the 1980s, the struggles that animated township life and rural resistance were driven by what he calls people’s politics — a political culture rooted in collective action, egalitarianism and popular forms of decision-making.
These were often deeply democratic, with consensus-building and grassroots deliberation. But as the ANC moved closer to formal negotiations, these popular energies were marginalised in favour of state politics — the politics of parties, elites and technocratic management. In this shift, the emancipatory thrust of the liberation movement was disciplined into a logic of state power, increasingly reliant on bureaucratic authority and coercion rather than popular legitimacy.
Neocosmos warns that this narrowing of political space resulted in a profound “closure of the political”, in which ordinary people were told that politics now belonged to experts, parliamentarians and party functionaries. The effects of this closure remain with us: protest is routinely criminalised, dissent is met with repression, and autonomous political subjectivities are treated not as legitimate democratic actors, but as threats to order.
In this sense, the degeneration of the liberation project in South Africa was not simply a betrayal of its economic promises but a foreclosure of its democratic possibilities. The very people who brought the country to the brink of change were pushed back into the margins once state power was secured.
As in other parts of the continent, the degeneration of the liberation tradition in Southern Africa has been uneven but undeniable. Political repression, elite capture and moral exhaustion are now hallmarks of governments that once stood for freedom and dignity. Their continued dominance owes less to popular mobilisation than to control over state resources, entrenched party machinery, and, in some cases, open violence. The promises of liberation remain unfulfilled, even as the language of struggle is repurposed to justify a new form of rule.
Today the ANC faces an unprecedented crisis. Yet the legacy of the ANC’s liberation struggle still casts a long shadow. Its history is woven into the fabric of the nation, and its moral authority, though diminished, continues to shape political discourse. The challenge now is whether the party can undergo the profound renewal required to reclaim its founding ideals — or whether its decline will open the door to a fragmented and unstable political landscape.
South Africa’s crisis reflects the broader pattern experienced by national liberation movements across Africa and beyond: a trajectory from hopeful transformation to entrenched corruption and crisis. The question remains what comes next, and whether the ideals of freedom and equality can be rekindled from below.
• Buccus is research fellow at ASRI and at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study (UJ)
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