Dried-up land/South Africa, January 2018. Flickr/Michael Mayer. Some rights reserved.This is one of the closing articles in the current series on ‘confronting authoritarian populism and the rural world’, linked to the Emancipatory Rural Politics Initiative (ERPI). The article opening the series can be read here.
Just a month ago, Jacob Zuma was president of South Africa. An authoritarian patriarch implicated in large-scale corruption, he had for years effectively rallied political support by invoking populist discourses around land reform and radical economic transformation.
Zuma’s shallow radical rhetoric sat astride disdain for the interests of ordinary rural dwellers, consistent defence of corporate and private property rights, and the perpetuation of the longstanding division between wealthy commercial farming areas and communal areas under forms of state-sanctioned traditional authority.
