"What is Democracy" - 5 day overview

An overview of module one of Tshisimani's "What is Democracy?" programme for community-based paralegals, that took place from 25-29 April 2022.
Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve - including information access, support with gender based violence cases and matters, assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution - this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualise them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.
Module one was about the realities that confront activists in South Africa today - inequality, racism, uneven patterns of land ownership, spatial segregation and endemic violence. The aim of the module was to ask questions about the persistence of these realities after the installation of a democratic government in 1994 - a government ushered in with the promise of “a better life for all”. In answering these questions, we dealt with the history of poverty and inequality; and how race, class and gender oppression worked together and configured the economy and society we live in today. We used different lenses to grapple with a history which has been profoundly shaped by colonial conquest and dispossession, slavery, violence, indentured and migrant labour, enforced segregation and the creation of a system of production relying upon cheap black labour. Through tracing back inequality, poverty, land deprivation, spatial segregation and violence; the module will looked at political and policy choices that post-1994 governments chose and continue to take. Participants grappled with:
1. What were the key demands of ordinary people in the struggle against apartheid?
2. What do these realities reveal about how our society functions, who rules South Africa today, different group interests and the nature of the post-1994 state?
3. In what ways are the everyday issues that community-based paralegals deal with linked to unfolding struggles for dignity and democracy.