At present, Earth's biosphere of land, freshwater and ocean ecosystems reabsorbs just over half of all human-created CO2 emissions. This annual uptake of around 5.5 billion tonnes of carbon (20 billion tonnes CO2) is just 2.7% of the nearly 200 billion tonnes of natural annual carbon exchange between the biosphere and atmosphere, and so is easy to miss. Furthermore, it cannot continue indefinitely. The natural carbon cycle is finely balanced between uptake and release, so even a small increase in uptake means that the carbon has to accumulate somewhere in the biosphere. This accumulation either has limits, as on land, or strongly negative consequences, as in the ocean.

At present, the biospheric CO2 sink is almost equally split between land and ocean, with a very small freshwater sink due to lakes, rivers and marshes. On land, the carbon is mostly in the form of humus and small fragments of dead plants and animals in soil, or wood in trees. The quantity of woody biomass that can accumulate on any piece of land has an upper limit, mostly determined by the climate. There is only so much tree cover that can be supported for a given amount of rainfall, fire and windstorm frequency, and the height of the trees is limited by the physics of water transport and structural strength. The bigger the tree, the more it respires – so eventually a balance is reached between photosynthesis and respiration. This is called a climax forest. Paradoxically, the ecosystems that are best for taking up carbon are the young ones recovering from disturbance, not the old ones which are nearly carbon neutral. Biomass carbon can be lost suddenly, especially as a result of fire, windstorms or pest outbreaks. These disturbances are becoming increasingly frequent as a result of climate change.

Soils also have an upper carbon storage limit, determined by their depth, clay content and degree of waterlogging. As the temperature and size of the organic carbon store in an ecosystem rise, so does the rate at which the ecosystem releases CO2 through microbial respiration.

Nestled in the most north-eastern part of South Africa, close to the border of Zimbabwe, lies the rich cultural landscape of the Venda people. It is a community informed by a long tradition of royal lineage and a vibrant history woven with incredible legends of sacred forests and lakes. It is the smallest ethnic group in South Africa and its language, Tshivenda, is spoken almost exclusively by those of the community. Tshivenda has not been widely adopted like isiZulu or isiXhosa in an urban environment. The language is described as melodic and lyrical in its use of innuendo, which draws strongly from the oral histories and customs of the community. It was this location and the language that was the inspiration for director Nshavheni Wa Luruli's film Elelwani (2012), which is based on the first Tshivenda novel (of the same name) by Dr Titus Maumela.

The experiences of being a co-producer on Elelwani gave me immediate access to the community and a privileged perspective of how the community had viewed the novel historically, and how they interacted with the material in a contemporary context through the production process.

It is my intention here to connect aspects of the production process with the narrative content of the film and its interpretation, both from a close textual reading (as is the convention of textual analysis), and with the interpretation of the story and characters as experienced during the production process by the community (particularly by the women) it claimed to be representing. The aim of this approach is to offer some reflection on what the expectations of filmmaking were in a community that is economically impoverished. In this sense, the idea of film is not simply a didactic tool but an instrument (through the production and location filming) to empower people economically in the region. This relationship between filmmaking as an instrument to empower a community so that they might gain economically from the ‘industry’ component of filmmaking is distinct from considering the film (the end product) that serves to empower women through its representation. Finally, I will turn my attention to how content might reflect some of the inherent gender contradictions in this community, bringing to the fore questions of gender empowerment and, perhaps, how it belies expectations when interpreted from a Western-normative paradigm.

Two recent developments stimulate me to rethink the role of the political party in the context of Europe in the twenty-first century. The first is the narrowing of democracy, in contrast to the far-reaching horizons of those who originally fought for it. This narrowing has been a continuing process of containment of democratic pressures since the moments when popular movements eventually won the universal right to vote in different countries at different times. These movements for democracy (in the first instance, the universal franchise) had two features in common: one was an umbilical link between social and economic demands and political power (‘social happiness is our goal, political power is the means’ [Thompson 1984], as the Chartists put it), and the second was a belief that the franchise was just the beginning of a process of achieving popular self-government, not an end in itself.

The second development is the conservatism and defeat of the nationally organised labour movements of the post-war settlement in Europe which could have been sources of counter-power to the economic and state pressures that were narrowing democracy. This does not mean that organisations of labour cannot be built anew. Indeed, the question of what such a rebuilding involves and what the conditions for its possibility are, will be a theme later in the chapter. Such recreation (because it certainly will not be rebuilding of the old) of organisations of labour is, I will contend, a key aspect of new forms of political organisation. But this will require a radical break from the organisational forms of the past.

THE LASTING POLITICAL LEGACY OF THE REVOLTS OF THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES

Exhaustion of the social democratic and communist traditions

Neither the marginalisation of trade unions nor the related narrowing of democracy proceeded without resistance. Indeed, the neoliberal counter-revolution was itself a response to movements to extend the principles of democracy and self-government to every level of society in the late 1960s and early 1970s. These movements were created by a generation whose expectations had been heightened by taking for granted the welfare state and its capacities, which were enhanced by the massive expansion of higher education.

Election 2014 offered a microcosm of insights into how the ANC maintains power in South Africa. It concerns more than endorsement by the people. The ANC's victory showed how skilled strategists in a well-resourced campaign of long duration, well supported by the state, and shrewd in the use of media and information can help build a victory of note in circumstances of attitudinal discontent and budding voter realignment. Before the election the ANC's vulnerable underbelly had become all too visible. Then the ANC used the election campaign to refurbish its liberation credentials and mobilise the national consciousness.

The ANC built its campaign on the fertile soil of deep voter loyalty. Even if ANC supporters were critical, they found it difficult to take the step of switching to other parties. This orientation assisted the ‘chosen party’ to produce a victory above 60 per cent. Nevertheless, the ANC remained on shifting ground. Neither its iconic liberation status nor the delivery potential that might have assured seamless electoral allegiance was working as well as desired. The ANC received wake-up calls. The result showed that substantial segments of the middle and working classes who had benefited from ANC rule were now willing to either vote against the ANC or to abstain. The ANC's own analyses of its 2014 result told the story of how it felt betrayed by those who had switched their votes to the EFF or the DA. The ANC was seemingly unable to contemplate how 200 000 fewer voters, despite an electorate that had grown by 2.5 million from five years before, refused to accept its campaign's ‘good story’ as sufficient reason to endorse it.

The electoral verdicts in the metropolitan areas pointed to the crux of the matter: the ANC's decline despite its dominance, especially in the Gauteng metro trio of Ekurhuleni, Tshwane and Johannesburg. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan Municipality voters confirmed the slippery slope. Evidence of slippage had already emerged in the 2011 local elections, and the 2014 national and provincial elections continued the trend. The ANC prevailed in Gauteng, but it received a chilling message. Work had to be done to stop the bleeding. Could the ANC change in the post-election period to show its willingness to listen to voters on issues of poor governance and representation, compromised leadership and policy issues touching the people's pockets and stomachs?

Saartjie Baartman has been utilised in a broad range of public articulations, including works by artists, writers, scientists, historians and filmmakers. These articulations can be located across Europe, Africa and the United States of America. Within the European context, specifically, the most significant writing on Baartman begins with the pseudo-scientific offerings made by French comparative anatomist and zoologist Georges Cuvier.

Baartman is an iconic figure who became a signifier of European cultural and scientific imperialism. Scientific racism constructed racialised notions of her body and genitalia, such as: the primitive, the savage, the animalistic, and the uncontrolled. The racialising and oversexualising of her body and genitalia, and the ideas espoused by this racialising process, produced images of ‘nation’. These were useful to her European exploiters and colonisers under the rubric of science. Later, in the South African context, the assumptions of Saartjie Baartman's life that rely on seeing her as a victim furnished the imaginary reconstructive project of the post-apartheid nation.

In more recent times, within the South African context there have been offerings made by Penny Siopis in visual arts and by Zola Maseko in film.

A comparative focus of this chapter will be Zola Maseko's films The Life and Times of Sara Baartman (1998) and The Return of Sara Baartman (2003). These films function within the rhetoric and image-making associated with the post-apartheid South African nation-building project as they employ representations of Baartman, her narrative and her body as tools in the broader political project of re-imagining and reconstructing the image of the post-apartheid nation.

This nation-building agenda relies on Baartman's perceived lack of personal will. The myths of Baartman's life have allowed the postapartheid South African national imaginary and its institutions of nation-building to overlook the sense of self-determinism that Baartman demonstrated within the social milieu of her lifetime. While Baartman's historical context did not contain social and political structures that allowed someone of her race and gender to make her agency public, she did, however, continuously demonstrate acts of self-determination. This is exemplified by what we know of her performances, singing on stages, and dancing and playing the guitar in the taverns of Cape Town (Holmes 2007:34). These performances defied her colonially-ascribed and actual role as a servant.

The back of black political resistance was broken – albeit temporarily – after the banning of the ANC and PAC, and those political activists who managed to evade the police net were forced to operate underground. Many more fled the country and joined MK or Poqo in exile. This turn of events caused the National Party government to believe that it had normalised the political situation, a sense enhanced by the economic boom of the 1960s, when foreign investment flooded into the country and the annual rate of economic growth rose to 9.3 per cent. Job opportunities opened up, and as many black people found employment their focus shifted from politics to making a living.

The black residents of Kroonstad also benefitted from this economic boom. At the close of the 1960s, a significant number were employed. By then, Setiloane writes: ‘Kroonstad town had grown tremendously. There were more shops, more garages, more restaurants, more hotels and more suburbs. Factories which were non-existent in the 1930s and 1940s had now sprung up. Job opportunities were numerous. People could also find employment in the police force, the prison department and at the municipal offices.’

In spite of the barrage of suppressive laws passed by the government during this period to intimidate black people, and the economic boom which deflected the political momentum of the late 1950s, a few people, operating clandestinely, attempted to resuscitate opposition politics and to conscientise the younger generation. These attempts, however, were disrupted. First, many of the adult activists who were part of the secret meetings fled into exile. Second, some of the young people left Kroonstad to further their studies at tertiary institutions.

In the 1960s the government created ethnically divided university colleges to take the edge off black opposition politics, but this had unintended consequences. Instead of producing docile and apolitical university graduates who would go on to develop their different homelands, the atmosphere at these universities helped to develop the students’ political awareness. In the early 1970s these students played a pivotal role in politicising secondary and high school students who, in 1976, took to the streets to challenge the government. In Kroonstad, students and graduates from the University of the North (also known as Turfloop), using the black consciousness (BC) philosophy, played an instrumental role in reviving protest politics after the ‘lull’ decade of the 1960s.

South Africa's and the ANC's presidencies were the heart of state power, fused around the person of an unparalleled, controversial yet commanding head of state and government. The ANC propelled Zuma into power with the twin tasks of rescuing the ANC from subjugation to state power under former president Thabo Mbeki, and ensuring that the many hungry elites beyond the Mbeki circle would get their chance to ‘eat’ – but the ANC got more than it had bargained for: domination by a powerful and president-centred faction. The party found itself in the hands of a strategic and shrewd president who could operate the organisation and present himself as being in control while bumbling his way past a phalanx of problems.

The state leg of the presidency expanded in the time of Zuma rule. Even so, it was the ANC's Chief Albert Luthuli House and Zuma's hold on ANC power that towered over the president's private office in the West Wing of the Union Buildings. And this is only part of the story of precarious political power in the time of the Zuma presidency. In essence, the ANC under Zuma has more power over the state, but the ANC and the Tripartite Alliance are fractured and under control of Zuma and his associates. Under Mbeki, the ANC had become an increasingly limp attachment to the state. The Zuma-ists reversed this and reinstated the ANC in charge. Few had imagined at the time of Zuma's election the extent to which this reversal would in due course demean the ANC.

The presidency of South Africa has to be considered in conjunction with the presidency of the ANC. Similarly, the power of Jacob Zuma can only be understood with the linked consideration of his potent KwaZulu-Natal ANC power base and his state-wide powers to make appointments and create positions. This chapter explores further the locus of formal and informal power in and around the president, and the trajectory towards the completion of the second Zuma term. It illuminates the tragedy of a powerful, often underestimated president who manipulated his way into and in power, found his way around obstacles in power, and pulled the ANC to a point from where it would be tough to recover.

This chapter examines the context and implications of two transitions in Brazil: the political transition from a military regime (1964–1985) to democracy (1985 to the present), and the economic transition from import substitution industrialisation (ISI) (1930–1980) to neoliberalism (1990 to the present). These transitions have shaped the contemporary Brazilian political economy and the policy choices available to recent federal administrations. The chapter also reviews how neoliberal economic policies were implemented in a democracy, first under the centre-right administrations led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1995–1998, 1998–2002) and then under the centre-left presidencies of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2006, 2007–2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011–2014, 2015 to the present).

In this context, it is especially important to examine the policy shifts introduced during the second Lula administration. These shifts did not signal a decisive break with neoliberalism, but they inaugurated what became known as the ‘Lula moment’: a decade of significantly higher growth rates than had been achieved previously, and remarkable advances in employment, distribution and poverty alleviation. The chapter examines the economic and social policies underpinning the ‘Lula moment’, and reflects on the limitations of their policies, and those of neoliberal democracy, which have emerged through the political crisis of the Rousseff administration.

Following are eight sections. The first outlines the process of ISI and its limitations. The second describes the transitions from the military regime to democracy, and from ISI to neoliberalism. The next three review the first and second Lula administrations and the Rousseff administration. The sixth examines the distributional achievements under these administrations. The seventh considers the challenges now posed for the Brazilian Left, after the exhaustion of the ‘Lula moment’. The eighth section presents the main conclusions.

IMPORT SUBSTITUTION INDUSTRIALISATION

ISI is a system of accumulation based on the sequenced expansion of manufacturing industry, with the primary objective of replacing imports.1 Manufacturing expansion usually departs from the internalisation of the production of nondurable consumer goods (textiles, processed foods, beverages, tobacco products and so on). It later deepens to include the production of durable consumer goods (especially household appliances and automobile assembly), simple chemical and pharmaceutical products and non-metallic minerals (especially cement).

As South Africa enters its third decade of democracy, the economic heartland centred on Johannesburg is facing a major crisis. The drivers of this crisis are complex, potentially providing a perfect storm as they converge. The public remains largely ignorant of what awaits them and the regulatory response has been muted, muddled and misguided at best. This chapter seeks to describe, in layperson's terms, the environmental disaster unfolding around the financial hub of Africa as three key drivers – the end of the production life of the gold mining industry, the failure of the regulatory environment over the last century adequately to plan for a post-mining future and a transition to a waterconstrained national economy – come together. The chapter will argue that these three drivers are converging at the same time that government's capacity to respond seems to be at its weakest in the history of our young democracy. The main focus will be on an analysis of the environmental and social issues associated with the legacy of gold mining to show that Johannesburg is the epicentre of a slow onset disaster, and is increasingly going to be known as the most uranium-contaminated city in the world – unless we can reverse this trend through policy reform to attract investment into the many brownfields mining sites that now dominate the landscape.

THE GOLD MINING DILEMMA

A staggering 40 per cent of the gold ever produced on the entire planet in all recorded history comes from the Witwatersrand goldfields (Hart 2013). The discovery of gold in 1886 changed the trajectory of the South African economy forever (Turton et al. 2006). Triggering the Second Anglo-Boer War that led ultimately to the decimation of the Afrikaner nation, not on the field of battle, but in the squalor of the concentration camps arising from the scorched earth policy instituted by the British (Porch 2000), this whole process created a civil service and a legal system designed to maximise profits from mining by externalising all environmental and social liabilities (Turton 2009, 2015). That bureaucracy functioned with ruthless efficiency from the Act of Union in 1910 until the transition to democracy in 1994 (Turton 2010, 2015).

Higher temperatures, shifting seasons, more frequent and extreme weather events, flooding and drought will significantly challenge future agricultural food production in most parts of the world. In a dry country like South Africa, which averages just 450 mm rainfall a year, water is a critical issue. About 60–70% of the water resources of South Africa are currently used for agriculture.

Global warming and associated changes in rainfall patterns are beneficial to some forms of agriculture in some places, notably in areas currently too cool for optimum production, or where rainfall is projected to increase more than the projected increase in evaporation, so leaving the soils moister. Every crop and animal has a temperature optimum for growth and yield. For most, this lies in the range 25–30°C. In general, places that are already warmer than this during the growing season will experience lower production as the temperature rises further, whereas places cooler than optimal will benefit from warming. Mean global warming of up to about 2°C above the pre-industrial average is predicted to result, globally, in a rough balance between less and more productive regions, meaning that total global food production will remain approximately the same as it is now, all else being equal, even if there are large local changes. Above 3°C of warming, overall global agricultural production is projected to fall steeply.

The interior of Southern Africa is warming at about twice the rate of the global average, and is mostly already above the temperature optimum. Southern Africa therefore falls into the category of regions where agriculture will be negatively affected overall.

The agricultural Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in South Africa is more or less evenly spread between livestock, short-duration crops (principally cereals such as wheat and maize), and long-duration crops such as fruit orchards and vineyards. All are vulnerable to climate change, but in different ways. Livestock (cattle, sheep, goats, pigs and poultry) are warm-blooded creatures. They produce heat as a by-product of metabolism, but need to maintain a steady body temperature between 36 and 38°C. As the ambient temperature approaches this fixed body temperature, they must stay in the shade instead of feeding, which means that less energy is available for growth.