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In his writings, Bernard Magubane theorizes racial capitalism but without necessarily invoking the term. Instead, he frequently refers to "the political economy of race and class" in the South African society. First, Magubane traces the roots of capitalism and racism in South Africa back to European expansionism. Second, he grapples with dispossession during the colonial period and calls it "the fact of conquest". This period was a significant prelude to apartheid capitalism and racism. Third, having analyzed these forms of domination, he argues that black people in South Africa would be liberated through the insurrection of the working people. Magubane's main contribution is his use of historical analysis to understand the next move by imperialism and its impact on the interaction of race and class and the struggle for liberation. Magubane seeks to develop a clear theoretical framework to understand the nature of the South African society. In this paper, I will attempt to illustrate Magubane's contribution to Marxist thought based on his study of South Africa's racially hierarchical political economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the salience of sport in the lives of eight-year-old and nine-year-old South African primary school boys. Drawing on ethnographic and interview data, I argue that young boys' developing relationship with sport is inscribed within particular gendered, raced and classed discourses in South Africa. Throughout the paper I show differences and durability of meanings across the social sites that affect and position blacks, white, boys and girls. It is argued that young boys' early association with sport is centrally about identity and doing sport, or at least establishing interest in sport is one important way in claiming to be a real boy. The findings have implications for the call by the South African Government to get the nation to play. [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]

This paper draws on fieldwork done in Greystone School in South Africa, a single sex girls' school. I explore how the legacy of coloniser and colonised is reconfigured through the history of the school and the particular racialised politics of South Africa, where race and class have always been imbricated in differently nuanced ways before, during and after apartheid. The young women have, for the most part, been produced and produced themselves as white youngladies– with the politesse and habitus that this implies. Thus, despite the current intake of a significant number of black girls from further north in Africa, some local Indian (in South African terms) pupils and a very few local black (African) young women, the school continues to support the production of whiteness and (middle) class amongst their students. Throughout, I show how global colonial and postcolonial narratives of whiteness have (and have had) their own particular form and relationship to narratives of whiteness in the changing South African context. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the ways in which children's leisure time was conceptualised and directed in the Cape Colony between 1850 and the end of the century. Using diaries, letters, and evidence presented to Parliamentary commissions of enquiry, the article argues that the notion of ‘productivity’ was central to ideas around leisure time during this period. Beginning with an overview of the leisure activities of white, middle class, and of poor, coloured, white, and African, children in Cape Town and the Boland during this period, the paper then moves on to a discussion of the child-related work of the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC). Although other churches organised Sunday Schools and other children's societies, the DRC began this work considerably earlier and achieved a much wider reach. This analysis of children's leisure time demonstrates the extent to which children preoccupied colonial commentators and organisations during the second half of the nineteenth century. The history of childhood remains unexplored within South African historiography. This article addresses this lacuna. It sheds light not only on the changing nature of childhood in the nineteenth-century Cape Colony, but also provides new ways of understanding the colony's industrialisation and economic expansion as a result of the mineral revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article considers the social and political action of South Africa's black middle classes during the Jacob Zuma administration (2009 and 2018) during which the governing party fragmented in a disorderly way, partly dissolving traditional class lines. Swathes of black middle classes left the governing party to join the militant Economic Freedom Fighters, new smaller parties and the main opposition party (the Democratic Alliance). The class-based fallout was consequential for the governing party, as it was for theories of middle classes. Using South Africa's experience, this article offers a critique of the dominant neoliberal tradition which imagines an orderly and politically homogeneous class. It further argues that social and political action among the black middle classes should not be viewed as generic, it is rather shaped by dynamics unique to South Africa, including social memory. This, it is argued, blurs class behaviour as articulated by prevailing class theories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School choice and commuting in Ladybrand's three high schools was explored. While all were numerically dominated by Black African children, only the fee-charging former whites-only public school, in the heart of Ladybrand, had a multiracial learner profile. Black African learners enrolled in this school hailed from mostly middle-class homes in the neighbouring Black African township of Lesotho. The homes are financially resourced. Parents are educated, married and employed in skilled or professional jobs. These learners passively commuted to school. The profile of the two no-fee schools, located in the former 'black only' designated peripheral townships, was different. Here learners are almost exclusively Black South Africans, living in poorly educated, single-parent homes. Household finances were weak with parents either unemployed or working in semi-skilled or unskilled jobs. These learners either used a subsidized government bus, mini-bus taxis or walked (in some cases long distances from neighbouring farms) to school. Parents said they selected no-fee schools on geographical proximity and low cost; whereas education quality drove choice for the former white school. The socio-economic and demographic profile of learners in no-fee versus fee-paying schools was statistically significant. Ladybrand's high schools are segregated by class, a situation reflecting much of urban South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Class' as a word or concept cannot be accurately translated into any of South Africa's indigenous languages. This article explores the relationship that language has with class by analysing responses drawn from a recent research study conducted in Soweto. There were two kinds of responses from a cross-section of Sowetans: a) the meanings which non-English speakers associate with the English word 'class', when they themselves recognise and understand the word (at least to some extent); and b) the words and connotations from their native language that non-English speakers use to approximate or substitute for the English word 'class' when they themselves do not know it, but have had it explained or glossed by field researchers. The term 'middle class' was disproportionately used among Sowetans to describe themselves in terms of class, and therefore this article places greater emphasis on the term. The findings have indicated the importance of language, and that 'class' in African languages has multiple meanings attached to it, which are completely different from the English. 'Middle class', switched into African languages, means 'in the middle' whereas 'in the middle' can denote the middle of a space or a social position. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of apartheid in the 1990s saw the rapid re-entry of South Africa into international sporting fields. This move, backed by the African National Congress (ANC) and given Nelson Mandela's endorsement, was seen as a strategy to attain two objectives; to cut-off the White right wing threat by placating the fears of the White population, and to bring in revenue that would be used to redress the legacy of apartheid sport. This article seeks, through a case study of cricket, to assess the effects of this strategy, especially in relation to the latter goal of redressing inherited socio-spatial inequalities. A key contention of this article is that spatial apartheid and inherited racial boundaries has remained in play, and this has influenced who could be selected to place professional cricket and who is excluded. Two and a half decades since cricketing unity, race is still with us, but so is class. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article shows how age as a category of dependency upends popular consciousness about race and class within postcolonial health systems. White individuals working within South Africa's private health insurance (medical aid) market and allied fields face a conundrum with respect to elder care. Some policies accommodate older adults' needs, but being older is costly and long-term residential care is excluded. Critically, these workers' position as middle- and upper-class enables them to pity older, poorer whites and blacks who more often use a dysfunctional public health sector, yet the elder care gap and other limitations reveal that these workers' own class position is also tenuous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The bifurcation of the musical arts education sector in South Africa into its public and private dimensions reproduces inequality along lines of class, race and geography. This article reviews policy and practice in the post-apartheid era to provide new insight into the crisis unfolding in public schools. An ethnographic case study of school musicking in the Ingwavuma district of KwaZulu-Natal describes some of the strengths and challenges associated with music education in rural areas. Indigenous musics are thriving, but teachers lack training in music literacy and have limited resources at their disposal. The 2012 National Curriculum Statement accords music a peripheral (and in some cases, optional) position in South Africa’s Basic Education syllabus (DBE 2012). Music is widely practised as an extracurricular activity that does not develop the skills in music literacy required for entry into tertiary education or the music industry. By contrast, students at private schools benefit from high-quality education in Western musics through independent examination boards. It is argued that an egalitarian approach to music education would return the study of music to the school curriculum in revised form. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Class categorisation should not only be informed by academic pursuits but by the lived experiences of those being categorised. A human or community-centred definition of class will illustrate the complexities of class experience and will thus present a dynamic conceptualisation. Through two life-history interviews of two black women from South Africa, this article illustrates that middle-classness for blacks during apartheid was marred with constant shifts related to the socio-economic and political impermanence of class position. Continuous negotiation driven by the need to be included in one's own community and the effects of being racially othered in interaction with whites and white spaces influences these shifts. In conclusion, the article argues that being middle class and black is heterogeneously experienced and thus complex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The slogan ‘no education without representation’ symbolised a belief in the anti-apartheid movement that without a democratic government, South Africa's people could not receive an inclusive education. Since the end of official apartheid in 1994, the education system has faced new transformative aims focused on ending racial separation and inequality. This article seeks, in three main ways, to contribute to debates over the progress made. First, post-apartheid policy is explored. Desegregation of schools and universities is seen as a key goal but is shown not to have led simplistically to inclusion. Second, three concepts of ‘place’ are considered as analytical tools in the study of inclusion. These are shown to hold different but relevant interpretations of how ‘place’ can influence processes of in- and exclusion. Third, the voices of students at the Universities of Cape Town and the Western Cape set out how students experience, negotiate and participate in campus in- and exclusion. Racial inequalities and divisions are seen to be reproduced as primary fault-lines of exclusion, but new class cleavages and recognition of other social differences are partly disrupting this traditional picture. The article considers the implications for both inclusive education in South Africa and wider geographical engagements. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Domestic history in South Africa is largely an unploughed field. Yet, for much of South Africa's past, households were the places where concerns about class, gender and race intersected at a very close, personal level. Moreover, it was in the residences of the power elite that the contradictions between the ideas of a migrant aristocracy, notions of empire, and the practical needs for the maintenance of an ostentatious lifestyle, were revealed. In this article I use one elite household in Johannesburg (1909-1923) as a lens through which to explore a variety of these domestic experiences and to expose the nexus between race, class and empire in South African domestic history at the turn of the 20th century, so as to further develop ideas first advanced in my article in the Journal of Family History (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

More than a decade since the dawn of democracy, South Africa remains one of the most unequal societies in the world. Civil and political citizenship may have -- rhetorically at least -- reduced the stark racial inequality in the relationship between citizen and state evident under apartheid. Some authors suggest a positive correlation between social citizenship and social equality. However, in post-apartheid South Africa, deep socioeconomic inequalities continue to mar the democratic content of society. Although rights to welfare and social services are nominally in place and are enshrined in the constitution, scores of poor, black South Africans are unable to claim social citizenship, precisely as a result of their class position. Using, as a lens, community struggles in Soweto against the commodification of water, this article seeks to explore the relationship between citizenship and class. It does this by addressing the relationship between the state and its citizens within the context of service delivery, paying particular attention to the impact of prepaid water meters and to the strategies that were employed by community movements in Soweto's 'water war'. The key argument is that under the system of capitalism, class inequality will persist regardless of the extent of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines an account by Dr Anders Sparrman, who visited the Cape of Good Hope in the 1770s, with the view of utilising travel accounts as historical evidence. Late eighteenth-century travel accounts of the Cape have attracted the attention of geographers and literary scholars, who focus on the emergence of naturalist history. Drawing on Edward Said, Mary Louise Pratt has linked naturalist classificatory schemes, promoted by scientific travellers such as Sparrman, to Euroimperialism and the assertion of a male bourgeois authority. This work elucidates the emergence of modern theories of nature, representations of colonised strangers, and the unequal relations of imperialism. Yet, scholars have paid little attention to what travellers have written about the labouring poor on whose labour their transcontinental journeys rested. This article reads Sparrman's account against the grain by examining his anecdotes of the sailors, servants, guides and wagon drivers he encounters. These stories, which diverge from the naturalist focus of the narrative, reveal a great deal about changing views of colonialism. They also complicate our understanding of race and class in an imperial context by pointing to a multi-racial underclass fellowship, centred on the sharing of commodities such as tobacco and brandy, in the Cape colony and beyond. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The voice as timbral entity has proved especially resistant to analysis. Focusing on the voice of black South African choralism, this essay attempts to do two things: provide an account of the colonial-historical conditions - political acts and "structural aesthetics" - in which the black choral voice was fashioned, and then, through an approach one might call the "phonetics of timbre", describe that voice's sonic identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sport has historically been an important element of South African popular culture, even though it was divided along racial lines for much of the country's history. In post-apartheid South Africa, sport is seen by politicians, sports officials and many ordinary people as a means to surmount race and class barriers and to forge nationhood. But sport remains a site of acute contestation over what transformation means: 'merit' versus 'affirmative action', beneficiaries of change, pace of transformation and so on. This conflict reflects the broader tensions over how South African society should be restructured. Change in racial composition at the level of leadership, coaching and players since 1990 has failed to transform cricket into a 'people's game'. The cricket establishment is following the lead of government in prioritizing the empowerment of a minority. Class privilege has replaced race privilege. At the same time, tensions generated by change are producing further hostility along the fault lines of race and class. There is, for example, a conflict over resources among those previously labelled 'Black': Indians, Coloureds and the majority African population. These struggles reveal the fragmented nature of post-apartheid South African society, notwithstanding attempts to define South Africa as a 'rainbow nation'. The historical, social, economic and cultural legacy of South Africa's conflicting pasts, the impact of globalization--and sport is a principal front of globalization, generating vast economic revenue and creating intolerable pressure to succeed--as well as post-apartheid discrepancies in economic and social conditions are all making it difficult to forge a united national culture, despite the attempt to use sport for the 'mythic enactment' of a collective South African identity. The tensions discussed in this article continue to be alive though the 'patterns of prejudice' are manifesting themselves in different forms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]