Search

South Africa in the 21st century has experienced a limping economy characterised by poor governance, corruption, massive unemployment, high cost of living and unhealthy competition to access limited economic resources for both locals and the millions of foreign nationals. During the period between 2008 and 2015, the country has experienced xenophobic attacks and perpetual factional fights between the locals and the foreign nationals. The country's government linked the events to criminality and a 'third force' when dealing and disseminating information to the media. The xenophobic attacks have in most cases occurred before or during election periods with politicians and print media reporters opting for the populist and rhetoric route of characterising foreigners as a scapegoat to challenges facing the local population which is central to social ills and economic hardships. In the last decade, the country's print media have been filled with stories that were anti-immigration and xenophobic which have resulted in the exacerbation of attacks by Black South Africans against immigrants of African origin. This paper draws viewpoints from government agencies and media reporters on how the print media narrated the xenophobic attacks of 2015 in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This manuscript seeks to underscore the influence of fake news on South Africa's xenophobia discourse. It argues that fake news disseminated by social media platforms is gradually becoming a key aspect of South Africa's contemporary xenophobia challenge despite scholarly oversight. The paper further argues that fake news in South Africa has largely been driven by the proliferation of social media platforms which have recently become substitute news platforms for a growing number of South Africans despite their glaring imperfections. The paper concludes by stating that the influence of fake news has bred socio-economic and political tensions within and outside South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In post-apartheid South Africa, on military integration, the new South African National Defence Forces (SANDF) faced numerous social and political challenges on integration, including former guerrillas absenting themselves from work without official leave. The paper examines the ways in which the Azania Peoples Liberation Army (APLA), an armed wing of the Pan Africanist Congress understood the 'new' army barracks as racialised and dominated by white soldiers. However, I argue that both former guerrilla formations and the white-dominated soldiers, SADF were unwilling to compromise their past political ideological understanding which had shaped them prior to integration in the 'new' army. The paper examines how the military was understood by APLA guerrillas, in which discipline and punishment was viewed as racialised. However, the new army was also insulated with some 'good moments. In substantiating my argument, I draw on 17 former APLA former guerrillas' who were once integrated into the new army and left prematurely. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

South Africa as a sociopolitical space of transition provides the opportunity for the renegotiation and contestation of taken-for-granted social identities. Social identities are practiced and performed through broad social processes and solidified through social institutions. I explore the usefulness of the concept of intersectionality for the framing of South African masculinities. Race, class, ethnicity/culture, sexuality, and gender are lived through everyday micro-practices in a range of social spaces such as work and home, yet macro-practices of race, class, ethnicity/culture, and sexuality have had a profound (but maybe less visible) shaping of social, gendered identities. South Africa's political and social transition is captured through the introduction of multiple pieces of legislation such as the Growth, Employment and Redistribution Strategy and the Civil Union Act (2006) that directly impacts the performance and practice of social identities. This paper is informed by qualitative research conducted with incarcerated, sex offenders in three South African prisons. This paper contributes to a growing body of knowledge on the significance of an intersectional framing of masculinities as central in the reproduction/production of social power and social identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Izikhothane, is an urban youth phenomenon that has taken some of South African Townships involving the preoccupation with extreme forms of materialism; fatalistic obsession with fashionable clothing brands and expensive alcohol. Local popular music provides the soundtrack. The paper aims to shed light and contribute to discussions about the evolving nature of South African culture concerning youth. It is informed by a constructivist paradigm according to which knowledge is self-constructed. The argument presented is that this youth phenomenon should be understood in the context of a state of flux in contemporary South African society and culture, spiritual malaise and anomie, and commodification, all of which have given rise to a sense of nihilism. The pervasive sense of superfluity belies the bleak economic background of the majority of the youth. The concept of black urbanism provides a different framework for theorizing this subculture as a black experience and phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The focus of this paper is the availability and use of resources in disadvantaged schools in South Africa 20 years after the country attained democracy. It examines the extent to which teachers working in these deprived environments use available resources to perform their key pedagogical functions. The unit of analysis is a group of teachers registered for an in-service subject didactics English module at the University of South Africa (Unisa). A qualitative paradigm was adopted for the study and two instruments were used to gather data: semi-structured interviews and a lesson observation protocol. The results show that while much has been done since independence to improve the quality of education in disadvantaged contexts, teachers are still too burdened by constraints presented by their teaching environments; they are therefore unable to take control of available resources. Improving the quality of teaching and learning would entail a re-imagining of the entire education system with a view of empowering the teacher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bok van Blerk's hit song ‘De la Rey’ invokes the name of a general who led Boer forces against those of the British Empire during the Anglo-Boer or South African War (1899–1902). The ‘Lion of the West Transvaal’ was renowned for his use of guerrilla tactics against the conventional methods of the heavily encumbered British and colonial troops. The performance of the song seems to strike a strong emotional chord with white Afrikaner audiences at a juncture when they appear to be undergoing something of an identity crisis in the throes of the country's transition. Van Blerk's song resonates with those imagining an Afrikaner community as victims of British imperialism, as well as those concerned about the future of their culture and language under an African National Congress government. For many white Afrikaners, nostalgia is not so much a hankering for a bygone era but a projection of a sanitised vision of the past into the future. This paper suggests that performative nostalgia is a useful concept to explain the appeal of the song in the context of the workings of Afrikaner identity politics in post-apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we know when a state is rehearsing genocide? This question has been answered in spectacular fashion in contemporary Africa: the veiled language of the Biafran war in Nigeria, which masked mass murder; the state-sponsored near-annihilation of the Tutsis within 100 days in Rwanda; the unbridled love for power by Islamic militias in Somalia that has rendered the country stateless; and the violation of Darfurians with impunity in Sudan. Such obvious cases make Africa appear to be a place where anything that can go wrong will destroy social norms overnight. Such instances also mask the violations of humanity occurring in neoliberal democracies such as South Africa. For example, the xenophobic attacks on resident black Africans from elsewhere are the product of the revived neurosis of separate development in the aftermath of 1994. South Africa's black middle class condones xenophobia and colludes in the state's failure to deliver real independence to the masses of unemployed South African blacks. Many of South Africa's black academics collude in the popular discourse that accuses black foreigners of taking their jobs and their women. The persecution of black foreigners, derisively known as Makwerekwere in South African official and local parlance, is also a consequence of the contradiction of globalisation and its bounded citizenship. Some have suggested ordinary South Africans have their own parochial biases, even though both local and national leaders have inspired them to assault and berate black foreigners. I draw on Francis Nyamnjoh's book, Insiders and Outsiders: Citizenship and Xenophobia in Contemporary Southern Africa (2006), and Michael Neocosmos' work, From ‘Foreign Natives’ to ‘Native Foreigners’, Explaining Xenophobia in Post-Apartheid South Africa: Citizen and Nationalism, Identity and Politics (2006), to discuss how xenophobia choreographs everyday life in South Africa. The paper argues that beyond the role that South African leaders and the masses continue to play in persecuting individual and black foreigners, other African countries have not stood up against South Africa's chauvinistic behaviour and its crimes against humanity. Whatever the source of this silence from the rest of the continent, the South African state and a significant portion of the country's population has felt free to deploy its resources to persecute, undermine and exploit foreign blacks without censure either from the African Union or from the United Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Antjie Krog's autobiographical novel A change of tongue presents a diversified conglomerate of different genres and parts. One of the major thematic focal points is the evident aim of the I-narrator/protagonist to reconstitute her identity as a white Afrikaans woman so as to establish her claim to belong, as a 'post-white' African, to the land and its aboriginal people. This paper investigates this intent through an analysis of the depiction of the physicality of the novel's main figures, and especially that of the I-narrator. This analysis, in turn, reveals a significant tendency towards mythicising, which highlights some of the problematic of the text, along with the inner contradictions inherent in the I-narrator's desire to be assimilated unquestionably and legitimately into the new socio-political context of her country. It will be shown that her attempt to re-write her personal white identity into a native African one leads to the individualistic and subjective misrepresentation of an established historical reality and context by mythicising it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oliver Schmitz's Hijack Stories (2000) is a story of cross-over cultures and mixed genres set in Johannesburg. In this blurring of boundaries, he presents us an interplay between the dangerous city of both fact and fiction. Schmitz's cinematic depiction of the city, weaves in and out, as well as to and from yuppie neighbourhoods and Soweto. Thus, we see how post-apartheid Johannesburg is a place of hybrid identities not only in the different spaces of the city, but through the influence of global hip-hop cultures, as well as the real and imagined perceptions of the city's 'citizens'. This paper examines the way in which Schmitz's film intersects these relationships in this edgy city. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The birth of a democratic South African state is being accompanied by increasing rates of HIV/AIDS related deaths among the country's young citizens. By the late 1990s South Africa became known as having the highest HIV/AIDS infection rates globally, with the worst hit province being KwaZulu-Natal, the focus of this article. Given these shocking realities of sick bodies and living in the presence of constant death, it is not surprising that studies that probe the medical, social and economic implications of this disease have dramatically increased over the past decade. However, what remains under explored are general continuities and changes within African women's lived experiences, which are being informed by their changing experiences of physical and spiritual uprootedness, economic and existential survival, constancy of death experiences and the desire for intimacy in a highly strained everyday that continues to be shaped by this epidemic. In addition to exploring these mundane aspects of young women's lives, the paper aims to broaden concepts of agency under limit conditions by emphasizing the role of young women's flawed agency, as they attempt to remake their social worlds under conditions where historical violences still resonate but now with an encounter with AIDS. By fitting the project within a socio-historico and cultural framework of viewing African youth sexualities, I will also show how this creates opportunities to tease out broader issues of personhood, choice, risk, interrelationships, childbearing, individuality, communality and love, and more generally how meanings are generated in times of socio-cultural breakdown. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper argues that there is a serious rupture between the attempt to create a post-Apartheid social system in South Africa and social action. This affects four areas of sociality: gendering systems, livelihood systems, signifying systems and value/normative systems. The consequence of this is that actions and actors in 'civil society', in their attempt to respond to social pressures, fragment and dissipate efforts to steer the society towards what its normative and institutional designs intended in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent scholarship on race in South Africa reveals that post‐1994 performances of whiteness are plagued by considerable anxiety. Shifts in identification that have been taking place under the sign of whiteness since the end of minority rule can be ascribed, in part, to the fact that previously sanctioned stagings of whiteness are increasingly registered as untenable in the everyday post‐apartheid inter‐racial encounter. In the shadow of these changing pressures, white South African cultural workers have been working hard to revise available categories of identification and to offer new vocabularies for thinking through inter‐subjective relations and racial embodiment in a democratic South Africa. This paper reads one of the cultural texts engaged in this project, namely Antjie Krog's A Change of Tongue, in an effort to consider some of the terms that are emerging to make the white South African body compatible with the ideological projects of the post‐apartheid order. Krog uses translation – as a trope and as a practice of inter‐lingual, subjective and somatic transfer and transformation – to mediate some of the ideological challenges faced by the post‐apartheid white Afrikaner. I argue that what Krog's theorisation of translation attempts to offer the white Afrikaans subject is premised on an ultimately idealistic and individualistic conception of personal fulfilment through the fraught process of ’Africanisation‚. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Paper Explores The Discursive Shifts of The Meaning of ''belonging' In Colonial And Apartheid South Africa. Through A Discussion of The Disciplinary Conceptions of Belonging Within historiographical And anthropological studies, It Argues That These Shifts Are Implicated In Complex Ways With What Should Be Seen As Differentiated Settler-Colonial And Settler-Nationalist Projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interprets the views of author, Albie Sachs on cultural imagination and expression in South Africa discussed in his paper entitled,"Spring Is Rebellious: Arguments about Cultural Freedom". Positivist and revisionist conception of social and cultural change; Aspects of cultural transformation; Role of ideology in relation to artistic expression.