Rethinking Democracy (2022-2023)

South Africa boasts the highest inequality globally, despite three decades of democratic governance. Landlessness, exploitation, poverty, racism, violence, corruption, and service collapse persist. Politics faces mounting distrust, associated with elitism, patronage, and divisive agendas. Different explanations and answers to these challenges are presented. As the 2024 elections approach in South Africa and 64 other countries globally, political parties take centre stage: each representing different – or perhaps similar – explanations and answers to a countries challenges. Through delving into these challenges, explanations, and proposed paths to a better future, this course navigates South Africa’s past, present, and potential futures: exploring themes of African solidarity, critically assessing 1994’s significance, integrating global democratic perspectives, and scrutinizing elections’ role in participatory democracy.

Designed specifically for community-based paralegals and fieldworkers who provide a range of services to the communities they serve – including information access,  support with gender based violence cases and matters,  assistance with evictions, labour, consumer and social security matters as well as different kinds of dispute resolution – this course will locate the historical roots of the day-to-day issues that advice offices contend with and contextualize them within broader contestations, resistance and imaginations about democracy.  

Woven through the course are these questions: 

1. What do the realities that community-based paralegals deal with on an ongoing basis reveal about the texture of South Africa’s democracy? 

2. How can we explain the persistent and growing inequalities and injustices that dominate South Africa today, nearly 30 years into democratic rule? 
3. What are some of the big struggles waged in South Africa today? What do they teach us about democracy, resistance and imagination?
4. What does a democracy for the many, not a few, look like? What can we learn – from the past and today – about attempts to craft expansive and radical notions of democracy? 

Freedom Under Fire (2025)

Freedom Under Fire was Tshisimani’s flagship political education course for community-based paralegals, delivered as a two-module programme in 2025. Module One took place in KwaZulu-Natal from 25–30 May, followed by Module Two in Johannesburg, bringing together paralegals from across South Africa to collectively deepen their political understanding of law, democracy, and power in a rapidly shifting national context.

The course was designed as a foundation programme that situated paralegal work within broader struggles for dignity, justice, and freedom. Module One, titled “Promises of Freedom: Past and Present Challenges,” focused on building a strong historical, theoretical, and political grounding. Participants engaged deeply with South Africa’s history of colonialism and apartheid, examining how race, class, gender, and land dispossession continue to shape inequality and democratic life today. Through popular education methods, the module combined political inputs, group reading, debate, creative exercises, and reflective practice to explore questions of freedom, inequality, land, gender, and the law.

Key activities in Module One included collective explorations of competing ideas of freedom through songs and slogans, participatory mapping of land inequality using storyboards and visual storytelling, feminist analysis of power and everyday life, and critical engagement with the Constitution and Bill of Rights. Participants also examined landmark and everyday legal struggles, reflecting on both the possibilities and limits of the law as a tool for social change, and situating their advice-office work within ongoing community struggles around housing, gender-based violence, service delivery, and access to land.

Module Two in Johannesburg built on this foundation by moving decisively into applied analysis and strategy. Participants engaged with contemporary case studies such as the Johannesburg water crisis, land occupations as forms of “expropriation from below,” and post-election political dynamics. Activities included the use of tools like the Ally–Enemy Spectrum, strategy and tactics workshops, digital campaigning sessions, and engagements with movement organisers. A site visit with the Inner City Federation grounded learning in lived urban housing struggles and collective organising in the inner city.

Across both modules, Freedom Under Fire responded intentionally to a more volatile political moment marked by deepening inequality, growing repression, and widespread disillusionment with formal democratic processes. The course functioned not only as a foundational training for paralegals, but as a space for collective reflection, political clarity, and strengthening solidarity among those working on the frontlines of community justice.