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Since the ending of apartheid, the state, political parties, civil society and ordinary people in South Africa have attempted to deal with the traumatic legacies of the past to engender a common sense of nationhood. This paper examines this process of dealing with the past through the theoretical lens of post-colonialism, focusing, in particular, on attempts to establish historical truth and collective memory for black women, who have often been most marginalised by colonialism and apartheid and excluded from dominant accounts of history. It argues that if black women are denied a presence and agency in the construction of collective memory, their belonging and citizenship is consequently mediated in the process of nation building. It considers how exclusionary and discriminating patterns are reproduced through attempts to construct national memory-archives, focusing on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). It then explores the measures being taken to create a more inclusive process of restoring collective memory. In particular, it discusses the importance and possibilities of creating a postcolonial archive, where the voices and texts of historically marginalised people can be incorporated into national projects of remembering and notions of belonging. The paper focuses specifically on recent attempts to archive black women's pictorial and written testimony in a memory cloths programme. It concludes that representations of the past by women are a valuable tool in tracing the ways in which the legacy of their belonging and social standing shapes their contemporary citizenship. The radical potential of postcolonial archives lies in the fact that they can work against more sanitised representations of contemporary South Africa and towards the requirements for social justice (especially for black women) that are embodied within, but were arguably not met by, the TRC and broader nation building processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Apartheid left in its wake a South Africa characterized by social inequalities that are embedded and reflected in all spheres of social life, including the higher education system. While the post-apartheid government has made efforts to transform the higher education system it inherited, the pace has been slow and has fallen significantly short of what many regard as modest expectations. This paper interrogates why transformation has remained elusive in the higher education sector in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly with regards to the institutional culture at historically white universities (HWUs). Focusing on the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Luister, a documentary film at the University of Stellenbosch, it employs critical race theory (CRT) as a conceptual framework and analytical tool. Using CRT identifies the centrality of racism in shaping the slow pace of transformation in general and concerning the institutional culture at HWUs in particular. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this lack of transformation, particularly in a time where poverty is endemic and unemployment rampant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on South Africa's post-apartheid foreign policy decision-making has stagnated. For more than a quarter century analysts have generally drawn on secondary material from other scholars, newspaper reporting, and the speeches of government officials to elucidate how South Africa crafts and carries out its foreign policy. The accessibility of previously classified archival documents and the availability of policy makers for research interviews holds the potential to advance scholarship on South African foreign policy along two fronts. First, these primary sources offer insight into foreign policy decision-making processes. And second, they encourage a critical re-evaluation of many of the traditional understandings and tropes that have dominated the study of South African foreign policy. This paper outlines the state of foreign policy studies in South Africa and then demonstrates the power of primary research to alter key ideas about the conduct and content of South African foreign policy through three case studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-apartheid South Africa, one of the central analytical questions is to do with the continuity of protests, in particular student movement protests that are highly driven by social, economic and political conditions in the present. In a social and political context of student protests, student movement is considered a threat to the state and a target for state violence. In this paper, we assert that student movement in contemporary South Africa is a social and political space in which we can begin to engage with and understand issues of dispossession and repossession as re-emerging struggles in South Africa. We also assert that student protests should be understood as real or perceived emancipatory terrain of transformation within and beyond the university campus, but also as the engine that engages with the unfinished struggle for decolonisation and transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. We draw on and engage with decolonial thought as our analytical lens through which to unpack and understand student protests in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nobel-prize winner John Maxwell Coetzee is considered one of the most controversial novelists and essayists in South African literature. He witnessed two crucial eras in South Africa: apartheid and post-apartheid. Being a white author put him in a difficult situation when he began expressing his ideas on political and social issues in his country during times of conflict. Critics see that Coetzee’s apartheid novels are evasively indirect when they comment on the prevalence of injustice in South Africa. Coetzee defended his position as a writer who rejected realism as a fixed norm for fictional representation, favouring an allegorical depiction of resistance against oppression. In his post-apartheid novels, however, there seems to be a shift in his mode of writing as he resorts more to realism to comment on the switch of balance and power in South Africa. Moreover, his apartheid allegories experience a similar change where they gain new dimensions and perform different functions in the post-apartheid context. This sudden modification in Coetzee’s novelistic practice has always perplexed his readers and critics as well. He has been accused of being an elusive writer who avoids any specific political orientation. Take as an example his apartheid novel Life and Times of Michael K (1983), which is considered an allegorical representation of resistance against oppression and injustice; where the silence of the colonized protagonist Michael K stands as an allegory of peaceful resistance rather than submission. On the contrary, his post-apartheid novel Disgrace (1999) adopts an opposite novelistic approach where realism stands out clearly, while allegory recedes. The silenced this time is not the colonized but the former colonizer and thus silence becomes an allegory of atonement rather than resistance. Nevertheless, Coetzee’s bewildering and allegedly paradoxical mode of writing can be explained when the two novels are read in the light of his talk ‘The Novel Today’, which is an articulation of the responsibilities of authorship. The aim of the paper is to use Edward Said’s ‘Traveling Theory’ to trace the origins or genesis of Coetzee’s concepts and ideas of authorship, which are expressed in his talk and practiced in his apartheid novel Life and Times of Michael K, and then to follow up the changes and developments that occurred in his mode of writing after these concepts and ideas travel to the new context of the post-apartheid era as manifested in his novel Disgrace. Finally, the paper provides a theoretically-based perspective that establishes Coetzee’s critical consciousness as the norm for his authorship and thus denies the accusations levelled against him of being ambivalent and paradoxical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At Critical African Studies, we often publish special issues that bring together a collection of papers examining a cutting edge topic in African Studies or examining in new perspective a long-standing area of theory and inquiry. The structural and material barriers to decolonizing African Studies publishing are real and significant, but social and procedural steps have gone a long way towards strengthening the journal's reputation as a top destination for scholarship for innovative and critical scholarship from the continent and from new authors. In our tenure, we have made a number of changes to the special issue process that are designed to strengthen the inclusivity and rigor of journal special issues as an academic practice and community-creating mechanism. In terms of journal content, as editors, we have sought through special issues to decolonize the conversations that are included in African Studies. [Extracted from the article]

Collective male sexual violence is part of a continuum of sexual coercion in South Africa. This paper is based on long-term ethnographic work in an urban township in the former Transkei region. Drawing on intensive participant observation and interviews with young men in particular, it attempts to make sense of emergent narratives relating to streamlining , a local term for a not uncommon form of collective sexual coercion involving a group of male friends and one or more women. The paper begins with an overview of existing anthropological literature on collective male sexual violence, going onto elaborate the different scenarios associated with group sexual violence in the fieldsite. It seeks to provide a multi-layered contextualization of the phenomenon by considering prevailing gender discourses, subcultural issues pertaining to the urban tsotsi phenomenon, the rural practice of ukuthwala (bride capture), young working-class Africans' experiences of marginalization, and the complex links between political economy and violence in this setting. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper traces the genealogy of sexual violence as a public and political issue in South Africa, from its initial marginalization and minimization during the apartheid era, through to the explosion of anguish and anger which marked the post-apartheid moment, and most dramatically the years 2001 and 2002. Of particular interest is the question of how and why the problem of sexual violence came to be seen as a scandal of manhood, putting male sexuality under critical public scrutiny. The paper argues that the sudden, intense eruption of public anxiety and argument about sexual violence which marked the post-apartheid period had relatively little to do with feminist analysis and politics (influential though this has been in some other respects). Rather, the key to understanding this politicization of sexual violence lies with its resonances with wider political and ideological anxieties about the manner of the national subject and the moral community of the country's fledgling democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on an interdisciplinary conference organised by the Kent Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities in April 2004. The title of the conference, Connecting Cultures attracted an extraordinarily diverse range of papers covering subjects from Caribbean narratives to translating India, to representing terrorism, and included papers on British Asian cinema and television, narrative and memory in South Africa, post-apartheid prose writing and culture contact in Border Zones. The paper of Terence Ranger, a speaker at the conference, considers a mode of translation as he explores the dynamics of the postcolonial interactions that exist in the system of Zimbabwe asylum appeals. He assesses the usefulness of examining asylum narratives both with the grain and against the grain to debate issues surrounding postcolonial assumptions both in Zimbabwe and in Britain. The papers that follow expand on various themes of the conference, commencing with a group of papers that discuss narrative and memory in South Africa and Zimbabwe.

Inadequate data and apartheid policies have meant that, until recently, most demographers have not had the opportunity to investigate the level of, and trend in, the fertility of South African women. The 1996 South Africa Census and the 1998 Demographic and Health Survey provide the first widely available and nationally representative demographic data on South Africa since 1970. Using these data, this paper describes the South African fertility decline from 1955 to 1996. Having identified and adjusted for several errors in the 1996 Census data, the paper argues that total fertility at that time was 3.2 children per woman nationally, and 3.5 children per woman for African South Africans. These levels are lower than in any other sub-Saharan African country. We show also that fertility in South Africa has been falling since the 1960s. Thus, fertility transition predates the establishment of a family planning programme in the country in 1974. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The documentation and analysis of the impacts of agrarian change and population displacement on the livelihoods of black South Africans under apartheid have occupied a central place in empirical research on South Africa. The country's transition to democracy and associated institutional and socio-economic transformations raise new questions about changing livelihoods in rural areas. This paper analyses processes of differentiation in Qwaqwa, Free State Province, in order to contribute to an understanding of the challenges faced by people in South Africa's former 'homelands'. The paper focuses both on the important economic, political and institutional changes that have taken place in one region of South Africa and on the particular household circumstances and social relations that affect livelihoods. Using evidence from the life histories of Qwaqwa residents, it demonstrates the complexity of livelihood diversification and ordinary people's attempts to alleviate risk and insecurity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important development in the post-apartheid South Africa was a departure from apartheid education through an outcomes-based curriculum reform. This resulted in several structural and policy tensions within the system. This paper highlights how these tensions have played themselves out and shows how government and stakeholders have addressed the challenges emanating from them. The paper argues that the tensions that dominated the post-apartheid curriculum reform have resulted in a significant paradigm shift focused on reclaiming knowledge and cognition in the classroom as expressed in the new revisionism in curriculum debate. From a policy point of view, it argues that the South African experience demonstrates how the pursuit of grand philosophies and ideals such as OBE and curriculum 2005 requires, at both macro and micro, systemic and institutional levels, generally and at the level of detail, a great deal of technical and political skills that cannot be achieved overnight. This calls for realism and pragmatism in school reform by focusing attention not only on what schools in society stand for but also on what they can realistically do and achieve, given their legacies and the particular circumstances in which they operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Max Gluckman's essay, 'Analysis of a Social Situation in Modern Zululand' (the 'Bridge Paper' to his students), first published in 1940, came to be recognised in the postwar period as constituting a major methodological breakthrough for British social anthropology. His chief innovation was to describe in great detail the events of a single day – a 'social situation' – from which he then proceeded to abstract the sociological patterns of the wider society. In addition, the 'Bridge Paper' is also recognised as one of the most significant anthropological critiques of segregationist policy in South Africa in the first half of the twentieth century. This article will argue that the coexistence of methodological innovation and incisive critique of segregation was not coincidental. I will demonstrate that by using what became known as 'situational analysis' or the 'extended case method', Gluckman was able to provide a more effective critique of segregation than his mentors, A. R. RadcliffeBrown and Isaac Schapera, had done. Indeed, it also enabled him to answer effectively W. M. Macmillan's criticism of anthropology by demonstrating that anthropology's theory and method could defend the coherent vision of the 'common society' that Macmillan fought so hard in intellectual circles to advocate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores aspects of the history of radio drama in Zulu from 1941 to the present. It briefly sketches in the history of radio in South Africa and the oppressive role of apartheid ideology in its formation and development. It also provides a commentary on the role of radio drama as a producer of culture throughout the apartheid years and into the post-apartheid era. Arguing that radio drama in Zulu has become a clearly definable aural genre deeply involved in contemporary South African life and intimately connected to the needs and desires of its large audience, the paper takes the reader through the decades of the 1950s and 1960s and shows how the skills of writing, producing and acting were the terrain of a small and talented group of practitioners who bypassed the snares of the censor and attracted an eager and discerning audience among both urban and rural listeners. A number of dramas are discussed and questions raised concerning the role of language in providing a medium for 'multi-accentual' engagement with a changing contemporary culture and with the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the urban literature in South Africa considerable attention has focused on the forced relocation and destruction of integrated communities under apartheid. The best known examples are the destruction of Sophiatown in Johannesburg, the razing of District Six in Cape Town and the annihilation of Cato Manor in Durban. In contrast, this paper focuses on the Warwick Avenue Triangle (WAT), an inner city community, and attempts to explain how one of the oldest mixed residential areas in Durban defied the apartheid state's strategies to destroy it. The paper traces the history of integrated residential development in the area and examines how slum clearance laws, the Group Areas Act and urban renewal programmes were used to try to destroy the community. Attempts by the residents to resist removal and relocation are assessed. Reconstruction and planning strategies to redevelop the area in the post-apartheid era are evaluated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Explores the idiosyncratic evolution of `The Citizen' newspaper and the factors that allowed it to survive and flourish in the wake of the Info Scandal. Paper's functioning since the transition; Possible scenario for the paper's future in the new South Africa.

Recent studies have begun to sketch the history of the Anti-Apartheid Movement in Britain, providing a convincing framework for understanding the transnational nature of the movement and its significance within the emergence of a global civil society. This article expands upon this work by exploring aspects of the ideological and the moral framework around which anti-apartheid sentiment began to crystallise in Britain in the late 1950s. Drawing on archival material from Church archives in both Britain and South Africa, as well as the expansive papers of the Africa Bureau, it focuses upon the activities of the well-known 'turbulent priests' who pioneered the campaign against apartheid in Britain: Michael Scott, Trevor Huddleston and Canon John Collins. It considers their status as the heirs of nineteenth-century humanitarianism before sketching the development of a Christian critique of South African racial policies during the 1930s and 1940s. The article then outlines the emergence of Michael Scott as a pioneer of anti-apartheid protest in the late 1940s, and his role in the parallel development of an international critique of South African policy and an embryonic language of human rights. In the early part of the 1950s, anti-apartheid protest evolved within the small and fissiparous British anti-colonial lobby, as its most vocal proponents began increasingly to articulate protest against apartheid in terms of solidarity with African political aspirations. The final section of the article describes how key ideological and strategic features of anti-apartheid protest were firmly established by the end of the 1950s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the chief challenges facing post-apartheid writers has been the need to produce literature capable of working through the losses of the apartheid era. While the resistance struggle instrumentalised literary production and politicised funerals, the post-apartheid Truth and Reconciliation Commission provided a forum for the expression of personal loss but also tended to subsume individual testimonies within hegemonic national narratives. With particular reference to work by Zakes Mda, John Kani, JM Coetzee and Ingrid de Kok, this paper argues that postapartheid literature invents new forms of both mourning and community, offering alternative times and spaces for the expression of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the life history narratives of a group of 12 black and white male and female undergraduate students at a historically white Afrikaans medium university, now undergoing its own transformation in post-apartheid South Africa. Conceptualizations of identity and discourse across four elements of context, setting, situated activity and self are employed to examine their accounts. Three framing discourses, comprising the official storyline of a rainbow nation and new higher education policies, the formal storyline of institutional change, and the informal space of relationships and interactions are used to analyse student narratives in terms of how they produce, reproduce and transform race and identity. What emerges is a complicated picture in which identities cannot be simply read off either from the official discourse or from colour and culture as the levels of discourse articulate and collide with a history of racial separateness and context and setting, with particular identity effects. What varieties of men and women now prevail in this society and in this period? And what varieties are coming to prevail? In what ways are they selected and formed, liberated and repressed, made sensitive and blunted? ( Mills, 1959 , p. 7) [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Union-South Africa Trade, Development and Cooperation Agreement, signed in October 1999, is an important symbol of South Africa's formal reintegration into the world economy after many years of debilitating isolation. However, the negotiations to establish the most important component of this Agreement, the free trade area, were protracted and acrimonious. This article examines the key issues at the heart of these negotiations. A central contention of the paper is that the multilateral regulatory environment governing the world economy had a determining influence over the content and character of this Agreement and, in so doing, acted to reinforce a profoundly unfair trading relationship. This case study is a microcosm of events taking place on a larger scale, with many African states being integrated into the global economy on unequal and disadvanta geous terms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is about the impact of market liberalisation on South Africa's citrus export industry. It responds to the lack of critical research on this topic: debates on the impact of liberalisation in agriculture are dominated by neo-classical economic approaches, which have uncritically applauded the impact of the 'free market'. According to these studies, (white) agriculture has become more competitive and responsive to global market forces. Our analysis of the 'deregulation' of citrus exports draws on political economy approaches to markets and suggests that the impact of liberalisation is far more complex. Based on detailed field research in the Western and Eastern Cape we explore the impact of changes in the regulatory environment for black and white citrus growers, newly privatised cooperatives, and labour. Our findings suggest that former cooperatives have faced problems in using the resources they inherited from the past. With regard to growers, there is increasing differentiation between those who are able to take advantage of deregulation and those who are not. A proportion of black and white citrus growers find themselves in the same structural position in relation to export markets in a liberalised economy. Deregulation has affected labour on farms and in packhouses in significant ways, although we suggest that the liberalisation of the economy has intensified structural changes in the agricultural labour market that have been present for some time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the political environment in South Africa is vastly improved, economic apartheid still exists: the economic divisions along racial lines created by apartheid are still in place today. Despite these divisions, neoliberal economists continue to press for a largely unregulated market system, which is unlikely to improve the lives of most black South Africans. This paper documents the role neoliberal economic theory has played and is continuing to play in frustrating and opposing fundamental change in the distribution of land, income and assets in South Africa. Neoliberal policies stem from an ideological attachment to free markets, rather than a substantive analysis of how market forces play out in an unequal society like that in South Africa. By choosing to focus on narrowly defined economic criteria such as GDP growth and allocative efficiency, neoliberal economists marginalize the vast problems created by inequality and poverty and thus overlook the potential benefits of a redistributive strategy. Neoliberal economic policies have been installed in South Africa by the ANC via GEAR and other policy initiatives, but these policies have made little progress in solving South Africa's economic problems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a study of letter writing amongst migrant workers on the Witwatersrand before World War II. It moves from a consideration of the paradoxical character of literacy amongst migrant mineworkers to a discussion about the history of privacy in South Africa. The paper suggests that both the field of popular culture and the politics of democracy can be better understood by paying attention to the particular forms of letter correspondence that have developed in 20th century South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since its inception in 1974, the South African family planning programme has been widely believed to be linked with white fears of growing black numbers. The programme has been repeatedly attacked by detractors as a programme of social and political control. Yet, in spite of the hostile environment, black women's use of services has steadily increased. Using historical and anthropological evidence, this paper delineates the links between the social and political context of racial domination and individual fertility behaviour. It is argued that the quantitative success of the family planning programme is rooted in social and economic shifts conditioning reproductive authority and fertility decision-making. State policies of racial segregation and influx control, ethnic 'homeland' politics, and labour migration of men transformed opportunities and constraints for black women and men, and altered local and household expectations of childbearing. Women came to manage their own fertility as they increasingly found themselves in precarious social and economic circumstances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the international reception of the fiction of South African novelist and critic, J. M. Coetzee, in order to examine the institutional and rhetorical conventions which shaped the selection and circulation of particular forms of writing as exemplars of 'South African literature' from the 1970s through to the 1990s. The representation of Coetzee's novels in two reading-formations is critically addressed: in non-academic literary reviews; and in the emergent academic paradigm of post-colonial literary theory. It is argued that in both cases, South African literary writing has often been re-inscribed into new contexts according to abstract and moralised understandings of the nature of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Sullivan Principles represented an attempt in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States to apply private pressure, as an alternative to government sanctions, to put an end to apartheid in South Africa. In this paper we assess the impact of the Principles on the employment practices of a sample of U.S. firms operating in South Africa that were signatories to the Principles. We examine the extent of their commitment to improving conditions of employment for their nonwhite employees, in the areas of employment growth, wages, and advancement into management and supervisory positions. Our results indicate that the impact of the Sullivan Principles was modest at best. The evidence leads to the conclusion that in this case, private pressure was not a powerful force for social change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is offered as a contribution to the larger task of providing a comprehensive study of South Africa's universities during the era of apartheid (1948-1990). Because of the centrality of the state to apartheid, the focus adopted is that of the role of the state in university affairs. The inadequacies of state theory in general are acknowledged, but, it is argued nonetheless, that the state warrants special consideration, provided the limits of this type of approach are firmly grasped. It is also suggested that the state's actual relations with the racially fragmented university system are best conceptualised in terms of Neave's notion of 'boundaries' which implies flux. Indeed, the interactions between the state and universities in South Africa were more volatile than is generally portrayed in the literature and were especially so during the 1980s as the state struggled unsuccessfully to overcome the popular challenge to White domination in general and to apartheid university education in particular. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]