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With the public frenzy over Thabo Mbeki's speech, "I am an African" that was delivered in 1996, South Africa has since become a subject of debate as to who is an African and what constitutes as African. This has been going on for almost two decades and a half now. Mbeki's speech appears to have evoked solemn questions relating to the issues of identity and culture. Subsequent to that speech, the South African public began to question what it meant to be African. The central point of enquiry was: what makes one an African? Is it the color of their skin? Their citizenship? Or is one merely an African because others regard him or her as such? These and many other questions arise when one touches upon the subject of Africans. These perplexing questions, however, are not only unique to the South African context; they apply, to some extent, to the general continent of Africa. With talks and debates about African renaissance, decoloniality, and indigenization, the question of African identity and culture resurfaces. Here, the discussion hubs around the issue of African persona and what it means to be authentically African. By means of document analysis, this paper critically employs a philosophical approach in order to grapple with the subject of identity and culture. This is done through a systematic discussion of the following facets: (a) history, (b) identity, and (c) culture. These three facets are therefore critically engaged in order to establish what constitute an African and what can be characterized as an African identity. [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]

Conventional forensic DNA analysis involves a matching principle, which compares DNA profiles from evidential samples to those from reference samples of known origin. In casework, however, the accessibility to a reference sample is not guaranteed which limits the use of DNA as an investigative tool. This has led to the development of phenotype prediction, which uses SNP analysis to estimate the physical appearance of the sample donor. Physical traits, such as eye, hair and skin colour, have been associated with certain alleles within specific genes involved in the melanogenesis pathways. These genetic markers are also associated with ancestry and their trait prediction ability has mainly been assessed in European and North American populations. This has prompted research investigating the discriminatory power of these markers in other populations, especially those exhibiting admixture. South Africa is well known for its diversity, and the viability of these particular SNPs still needs to be assessed within this population. South African law currently restricts the use of DNA for molecular phenotyping, and there are also numerous ethical and social considerations, all of which are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]