Tracking the historical roots of post-apartheid citizenship problems : the Native Club, restless natives, panicking settlers and the politics of nativism in South Africa

The launch of the Native Club in 2006 in South Africa as a new forum for the black intelligentsia provoked widespread debate from the academic and political fraternity that even implicated President Mbeki as the brains behind the project. The debates revolved around key and sometimes sensitive issues of race, citizenship, inclusion and exclusion, the limits and dangers of neoliberalism, as well as the dangers and limits of populist African nationalism. The politics and debates sparked by the Native Club also resonate with current crises within the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance and the second decade of South African democracy punctuated with a popular sense of betrayal. Currently the Native Club is housed under the roof of the Africa Institute of South Africa (AISA) in Pretoria (Tshwane). This working paper takes a politico-historical approach in its endeavour to understand and define the essence of the Native Club, going beyond the surface media exchanges that have characterized its launch, grounding the debate in earlier debates over race, class and the national democratic revolution to reveal the historical 'rootedness' of nativism and populism. [ASC Leiden abstract]

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