Search

Some of the studies in this publication excavate lost or disappearing indigenous toponyms. Those researchers contribute in a very concrete way to the preservation of indigenous toponyms, and thereby also the associated cultural heritage. The other papers explore how place naming functions as a mechanism with which to create mental maps and exert socio-political power.

Provides a new perspective on the struggle against apartheid, and contributes to key debates in South African history, gender inequality, sexual violence, and the legacies of the liberation struggle.While there have been many books on South Africa's liberation struggle during the 1980s and early 1990s, the story of the involvement of African girls and young women has been all but missing. This book tells their story, analysing what life was like for African girls under apartheid, why some chose to join the struggle, and how they navigated the benefits and pitfalls of political activism. These were women who, as teenagers and secondary school students,made an unconventional choice to join student organizations, engage in public protest, and take up arms against the state. They did so against their parents'wishes and in contravention of societal norms that confined girls to the home and made township streets dangerous places for female students. They participated in both non-violent and violent forms of political action, including attending marches and rallies, throwing stones or petrol bombs at police, and punishing suspected informers and other offenders, and even joining underground guerrilla armies. Thousands of these young women were eventually detained, interrogated, and tortured by the apartheid state. At the heart of this book lie the life histories of the female comrades themselves, who in interviews construct themselves as decisive actors in South Africa's liberation struggle. Primarily a work of oral history, this book is not only concerned with what female comrades did, but equally with how these women remember and narrate their time as activists: how they reconstruct their pasts; relate their personal experiences to collective histories of the struggle; and insert themselves into a historical narrative from which they have been excluded. Through exploring these women's memories, this book serves as an important corrective to South Africa's male-centric literature on violence, and provides a new gendered perspective on the wider histories of township politics, activism, and conflict. Emily Bridger is a Senior Lecturer in Global and Imperial History, University of Exeter. A social and cultural historianof modern South Africa, her work has been published in the Journal of Southern African Studies, Journal of World History, and Gender & History.

The Crosscurrents series highlights emerging theologies and biblical interpretations from Majority World and minoritized communities. The first volume in the series elaborates theologies of land, a theme often missing or ignored by churches and theologians, especially in the Global North. In this volume, four authors who represent Palestinian, First Nations, Latinx, and South African communities examine the intricate relationship among land(scape), migration, and identity. Together with a Malaysian Chinese, the authors deliberate on the complex issues arising out of political domination, as well as humanity's conquest and abuse of land that create unjust space, landless people, and the broken landscape of God's creation.

A powerful re-reading of modern South African history following apartheid that examines the violent transformation during the transition era and how this was enacted in the African townships of the Witwatersrand.In 1993 South Africa state president F.W. de Klerk and African National Congress (ANC) leader Nelson Mandela were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize'for their work for the peaceful termination of the apartheid regime'. Yet, while bothdeserved the plaudits they received for entering the negotiations that led to the end of apartheid, the four years of negotiations preceding the April 1994 elections, known as the transition era, were not'peaceful': they were the bloodiest of the entire apartheid era, with an estimated 14,000 deaths attributed to politically related violence. This book studies, for the first time, the conflicts between the ANC and the Inkatha Freedom Party that took place in South Africa's industrial heartland surrounding Johannesburg. Exploring these events through the perceptions and memories of combatants and non-combatants from war-torn areas, along with security force members, politicians and violence monitors, offers new possibilities for understanding South Africa's turbulent transition. Challenging the prevailing narrative which attributes the bulk of the violence to a joint state security force and IFP assault against ANC supporters, the author argues for a more expansive approach that incorporates the aggression of ANC militants, the intersection between criminal and political violence, and especially clashes between groups alignedwith the ANC. Gary Kynoch is Associate Professor of History at Dalhousie University. He has written one previous book, We are Fighting the World: A History of the Marashea Gangs in South Africa, 1947-1999 (OhioUniversity Press, 2005). Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Swaziland): Wits University Press

After decades of occupation and creeping annexation, the situation on the ground in Palestine/Israel can only be described as a system of apartheid. Peace efforts have failed because of one, inconvenient truth: the Israeli maximum on offer does not meet the Palestinian minimum, or the standards of international law. But while the situation on the ground is bleak, Ben White argues that there are widening cracks in Israel's traditional pillars of support. Opposition to Israeli policies and even critiques of Zionism are growing in Jewish communities, as well as amongst Western progressives. The election of Donald Trump has served as a catalyst for these processes, including the transformation of Israel from a partisan issue into one that divides the US establishment. Meanwhile, the Palestinian-led boycott campaign is gathering momentum, prompting a desperate backlash by Israel and its allies. With sharp analysis, Ben White says now is the time to plot a course that avoids the mistakes of the past - a way forward beyond apartheid in Palestine. The solution is not partition and ethnic separation, but equality and self-determination - for all.

Mandela: His Essential Life chronicles the life and legacy of one of the twentieth century's most influential and admired statesmen. Charting his development from remote rural roots to city lawyer, freedom fighter, and then political leader, Peter Hain takes an in-depth look at Mandela's rise through the ranks of the African National Congress (ANC) and subsequent 27 years imprisonment on Robben Island, as increasingly vocal protests against the injustices of Apartheid brought his struggle against overwhelming prejudice and oppression to the eyes of the world.This book encompasses Mandela's inauguration as South Africa's first democratically elected president, his'retirement'campaigns for human rights, a solution to AIDS and poverty. It goes on to chronicle his later years and death. Throughout, the humanity and compassion of this extraordinary world leader shine through. The author concludes with a critical analysis of his and the ANC's achievements, its leadership's subsequent slide into corruption, and whether under new direction South Africa can reclaim the values and legacy of Mandela, and the ‘rainbow nation'he created and led to such global acclaim.

In Apartheid Israel: The Politics of an Analogy, eighteen scholars of Africa and its diaspora reflect on the similarities and differences between apartheid-era South Africa and contemporary Israel, with an eye to strengthening and broadening today's movement for justice in Palestine.

A novel study of the complex connections between Nelson Mandela and the nationalist leadership in the ANC with their kinsmen inside the Transkei Bantustan state, that reveals the significance of ethnic belonging, so important in African history.Mandela's Kinsmen is the first study of the fraught relationships between the ANC leadership and their relatives who ruled apartheid's foremost'tribal'Bantustan, the Transkei. In the early 20th century, the chieftaincieshad often been well-springs of political leadership. In the Transkei, political leaders, such as Mandela, used regionally rooted clan, schooling and professional connections to vault to leadership; they crafted expansive nationalisms woven from these'kin'identities. But from 1963 the apartheid government turned South Africa's chieftaincies into self-governing, tribal Bantustans in order to shatter African nationalism. While historians often suggest that apartheid changed everything - African elites being eclipsed by an era of mass township and trade union protest, and the chieftaincies co-opted by the apartheid government - there is another side to this story. Drawing on newly discovered accounts and archives, Gibbs reassesses the Bantustans and the changing politics of chieftaincy, showing how local dissent within Transkei connected to wider political movements and ideologies. Emphasizing the importance of elite politics, he describes how the ANC-in-exile attempted to re-enter South Africa through the Bantustans drawing on kin networks. This failed in KwaZulu, but Transkei provided vital support after a coup in 1987, and the alliances forged were important during the apartheid endgame. Finally, in counterpoint to Africanist debates that focus on how South African insurgencies narrowed nationalist thought and practice, he maintains ANC leaders calmed South Africa's conflicts of the early 1990s by espousing an inclusive nationalism that incorporated local identities, and that'Mandela's kinsmen'still play a key role in state politics today. Timothy Gibbs is a Lecturer in African History, University College London. Southern Africa (South Africa, Namibia, Lesotho, Swaziland & Botswana): Jacana

Benjamin Pogrund, who spent 26 years as a journalist in South Africa investigating apartheid and who has been living in Israel for the past 15 years, investigates the accusation that Israel is practicing apartheid and the motives of those who make it. His study is founded on a belief in Israel, combined with frank criticism, to provide a balanced view of Israel's strengths and problems.To understand Israel today, one must first look at the past and so the book first outlines key foundational events to explain current attitudes. It then explores the contradictions found in the region, including discrimination against Israeli Arabs and among Jews, before concluding that it is wrong to affix the apartheid label to Israel inside the Green Line of 1948/1967. It also deconstructs the criticisms of Israel and the boycott movement before arguing for two states, Israeli and Palestinian, as the only way forward for Jews and Arabs.This detailed and balanced study offers a unique comparison between South Africa and Israel and explains complex political and social situations in language accessible to all readers.

An oft-neglected element of postcolonial thought is the explicitly psychological dimension of many of its foundational texts. This unprecedented volume explores the relation between these two disciplines by treating the work of a variety of anti-colonial authors as serious psychological contributions to the theorization of racism and oppression. This approach demonstrates the pertinence of postcolonial thought for critical social psychology and opens up novel perspectives on a variety of key topics in social psychology. These include: the psychology of embodiment and racialization resistance strategies to oppression'extra-discursive'facets of racism the unconscious dimension of stereotypes the intersection of psychological and symbolic modalities of power. In addition, the book makes a distinctive contribution to the field of postcolonial studies by virtue of its eclectic combination of authors drawn from anti-apartheid, psychoanalytic and critical social theory traditions, including Homi Bhabha, Steve Biko, J.M. Coetzee, Frantz Fanon, Julia Kristeva, Chabani Manganyi and Slavoj Żiżek. The South African focus serves to emphasize the ongoing historical importance of the anti-apartheid struggle for today's globalized world.A Critical Psychology of the Postcolonial is an invaluable text for social psychology and sociology students enrolled in courses on racism or cultural studies. It will also appeal to postgraduates, academics and anyone interested in psychoanalysis in relation to societal and political issues.

Apartheid vertigo, the dizzying sensation following prolonged oppression and delusions of skin colour, is the focus of this book. For centuries, the colour-code shaped state and national ideals, created social and emotional distances between social groups, permeated public and private spheres, and dehumanized Africans of all nationalities in South Africa. Two decades after the demise of official apartheid, despite four successive black governments, apartheid vertigo still distorts South Africa's postcolonial reality. The colour-code endures, but now in postcolonial masks. Political freedom notwithstanding, vast sections of the black citizenry have adopted and adapted the code to fit the new reality. This vertiginous reality is manifest in the neo-apartheid ideology of Makwerekwere - the postcolonial colour-code mobilized to distinguish black outsiders from black insiders. Apartheid vertigo ranges from negative sentiments to outright violence against black outsiders, including insults, humiliations, extortions, searches, arrests, detentions, deportations, tortures, rapes, beatings, and killings. Ironically, the victims are not only the outsiders against whom the code is mobilized but also the insiders who mobilize it. Drawing on evidence from interviews, observation, press articles, reports, research monographs, and history, this book unravels the synergies of history, migration, nationalism, black group relations, and violence in South Africa, deconstructing the idea of visible differences between black nationals and black foreign nationals. The book demonstrates that in South Africa, violence always lurks on the surface of everyday life with the potential to burst through the fragile limits set upon it and possibly escalate to ethnic cleansing.

A detailed and compelling volume that contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship.Representing Bushmen draws on the work of Jacques Derrida, Edward Said, and Martin Bernal to show how the study of language was integral to the formation of racial discrimination in South Africa. Author Shane Moran demonstrates the central role of literary history to the cultural racism and ideology that fed into apartheid by tracing the ethno-aesthetic figuration of the Bushmen in W. H. I. Bleek's theory of the origin of language. Moran examines the gestation of colonial ideology, and provocatively traces aspects of the post-apartheid rhetoric of commemoration and national unity to their colonialist roots. This detailed and compelling volume contributes significantly to current trends in post-apartheid scholarship. Moran emphasizes the need for a cautious interrogation of the colonial archive and scrutiny of critical discourses used by the would-be postcolonial intellectual, and poses a timelychallenge to those committed to exorcising that legacy. Shane Moran teaches at the University of KwaZulu-Natal.

The ongoing violence, despair and paralysis among Israelis and Palestinians resemble the gloomy period in South Africa during the late 1980s. Heribert Adam and Kogila Moodley show that these analogies with South Africa can be applied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict for two purposes: to showcase South Africa as an inspiring model for a negotiated settlement and to label Israel a'colonial settler state'that should be confronted with strategies (sanctions, boycotts) similar to those applied against the apartheid regime. Because of the different historical and socio-political contexts, both assumptions are problematic. Whereas peacemaking resulted in an inclusive democracy in South Africa, the favored solution for Israel and the West Bank is territorial separation into two states. Adam and Moodley speculate on what would have happened in the Middle East had there been what they call'a Palestinian Mandela'providing unifying moral and strategic leadership in the ethnic conflict. A timely, relevant look at the issues of a polarized struggle, Seeking Mandela is an original comparison of South Africa and Israel, as well as an important critique on the nature of comparative politics.

This book is a wide-ranging, lucid and powerfully argued analysis and critique of neo-liberal economics as formulated and imposed by the World Bank and IMF on developing countries generally, and Africa and South Africa specifically. It shows the extraordinary economic and human damage these policies have wrought over the past decade and more, and how they have displaced the originally radical and pro-people orientation of the African National Congress when it came to power.