Abstract

Africans have universally been considered as victims rather than as subjects of history. This article show how this view is false with reference to the case of the popular struggle in South Africa during the 1980s. After discussing some fundamental concepts developed in Badiou’s thought of politics and Lazarus’s theorisation of modes of politics, this article examines at some depth some of the features of the event of 1986–1987 in South Africa in which an excessive subjectivity was inaugurated through a mode of politics which challenged the militaristic conceptions of the national liberation struggles of the 1950s and 1960s. This event arguably pointed the way to a new mode of politics for the twenty-first century on the African continent which we saw manifested later in North Africa in 2011. The contradictions of this mode of politics are brought out in order to account for its saturation while its reactive subjectivity is accounted for in terms of a politics of representation which gradually established its dominance over popular affirmative politics.