Rainbow Junction: South Africa’s Born Free Generation and the Future of Democracy
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- Fifty-five percent of South Africa’s population today is under 25 years old, born with no living memory of apartheid. By demography alone, this “born free” generation will play an increasingly central role in the nation’s civic and political life. Therefore I ask: What attitudes, values, and beliefs characterize the born free generation’s views on democracy and civic engagement in South Africa? And what do these imply for the country’s future? Given South Africa’s democratic transition, I initially hypothesized that the born frees would possess distinctive views; like many researchers and authors, I took the very term “born free” to suggest a different set of attitudes about democracy and a certain liberation from the fetters of apartheid. Yet my results indicate that at the national level, South African born frees do not possess uniform views on the psychological, political, and economic aspects of democracy and governance. Although the generation never lived through apartheid, its lived experience is historically freighted and differs tremendously along lines of race and class. My analysis also shows something else: deep, pervasive racial cleavages in the psychological, political, and economic attitudes of the born frees, and in South Africa more generally. In one urban Johannesburg neighborhood, my data indicate that its born frees, overcoming both racial stratification and planned gentrification, do possess distinctive values and beliefs on the hyper-local level: my ethnographic work shows that these young South Africans have developed numerous civic micro-practices that enable and are enabled by interpersonal trust and use difference as a political resource. Hyper-local civic interactions can percolate upward, a process essential to consolidating democracy in the Rainbow Nation.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | May 2015 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Norgaard, Stefan | |
|---|---|---|
| Primary advisor | Diamond, Larry | |
| Degree granting institution | Stanford University, Program in International Relations |
Subjects
| Subject | Center on Democracy Development and the Rule of Law |
|---|---|
| Subject | Program on Urban Studies |
| Subject | Stanford University |
| Subject | South Africa |
| Subject | Born Free |
| Subject | Afrobarometer |
| Subject | Mixed Methods |
| Subject | democratic transitions |
| Subject | youth attitudes |
| Subject | ethnography |
| Subject | civic micro-practices |
| Subject | civic engagement |
| Subject | Rainbow Nation |
| Genre | Thesis |
Bibliographic information
| Related item | |
|---|---|
| Location | https://purl.stanford.edu/vv235mx1028 |
Access conditions
- Use and reproduction
- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
Preferred citation
- Preferred Citation
- Norgaard, Stefan. (2015). Rainbow Junction: South Africa’s Born Free Generation and the Future of Democracy. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at: http://purl.stanford.edu/vv235mx1028
Collection
Stanford University Urban Studies Capstone Projects and Theses
Contact information
- Contact
- stefan.norgaard@gmail.com
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