Celebrity and Protest in the Anti-Apartheid Movement

Abstract

This special issue proposes to juxtapose accounts of anti-apartheid protest and solidarity efforts with the field of celebrity studies in order to deepen our understanding of both through their conjunction. As our contributors show, opponents of apartheid in South Africa and beyond were cognisant of the importance of cultivating ties with local and global media, as well as with individuals who enjoyed easy access to the media as a consequence of their "celebrity capital" (Olivier Driessens, 2013). This introduction to the special issue revisits the notion of "networked celebrity" (Fred Turner and Christine Larson, 2015) in order to set the stage for the case histories that follow. Rather than considering the actions of individual women and men of renown with respect either to their individual "consecration" as celebrities (Bourdieu, 1994), or their capacity to extract individual benefit from it, the emphasis falls on understanding various manifestations of celebrity culture that take their bearings from the collaborative and decentred nature of the global protest against apartheid. The special issue challenges the individualising emphasis of celebrity studies and its predominantly metropolitan orientation, offering 2 in the process a new set of perspectives on the transnational dimensions of the global anti-apartheid struggle.

ANC and its use of history to build its brand

“…Throughout the 1970s, 1980s and early 1990s, the collective imagination of people around the world was captured. This South African political narrative led to numerous pop concerts, repeated media representations, and numerous popular protests (Bethlehem & Zalmanovich, 2020). Such events ultimately helped to construct Nelson Mandela as a universally recognisable political struggle icon (Louw, 2020); someone who is arguably, as big an international brand as Che Guevara (Carter, 2012;Casey, 2012).…”