Experiences of democracy in South Africa from a feminist perspective

Shamim Meer highlights the need for ongoing organization in civil society in order to achieve the redistribution necessary to change unequal and oppressive social relations that continue to exist in South Africa despite the new democracy. She explores how and why shifts took place in South Africa from a liberation movement's dreams of socialism or at the very least social democracy, and an end to sexism, to a pragmatic acceptance that there is no alternative to a neoliberal economic and political order, as that movement became the ruling party in a new democratic order. She points to the need to engage in struggles over meanings of both democracy and feminism, at the same time as material struggles are waged.