South Africa’s democracy, brought about through grassroots mobilization, is just a decade old. The struggle against apartheid mobilized hundreds of thousands of South Africans not simply around the political goals of freedom and equality, but around their exclusion from decision making and service delivery at the local level. Civic associations, which played a prominent role in the 1980s, mobilized people around slogans such as “one city, one tax base”, and used consumer and service payment boycotts to force local authorities and businesses to negotiate around service delivery. Freedom, equality and the end of apartheid were obviously the primary goals, but they were undergirded by community struggles around participation in local development.