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This article discusses two papers by Steven Stern and Daniel Goldin that delve into the concepts of selfobject experience and empathy in psychoanalysis. The author highlights the need to explicitly articulate implicit theoretical concepts and acknowledges the influence of subjectivity and sociocultural positioning on understanding these concepts. Stern's paper explores the idea of a complex selfobject experience and introduces the notions of fittedness and specificity of connection. The author relates Stern's ideas to their own work on twinship experiences. The article also addresses the dangers of dehumanizing others through objectification and reductionism, both in clinical practice and in broader societal contexts. The concept of empathy and its role in therapy are also discussed. The author examines the ideas presented in two other papers, one by Stern and one by Goldin, and reflects on how these ideas relate to the issue of difference. The author suggests that empathy involves recognizing both similarities and differences between individuals, and that therapy can only be effective when these aspects are acknowledged and embraced. The author also advocates for a more self-aware and less ethnocentric approach to therapy in order to better address issues of difference. [Extracted from the article]

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]

In this personal response to Gillian Straker's paper in which she analyses the significance of and contributions to the Apartheid Archives, I reflect on memories of apartheid re-evoked for me. These include recollections of the degree to which racial consciousness entrenched by apartheid contaminated personal relationships, as well as a recognition of the complex intersection of race and class in influencing the roles of victims/survivors, beneficiaries, or perpetrators. Other themes touched on are the question of nostalgia for elements of life during the oppressive apartheid period, and on the reclaiming of language that was perverted by the apartheid system. In sum, I affirm the value of the Apartheid Archives in facilitating a processing of traumatic memories and their integration. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper examined the brutal tactics used by security forces in the early days of the COVID-19 lockdown in South Africa. Key questions raised relate to the philosophical (dis)connectedness of their actions. The paper posits that the way in which some police and soldiers conducted themselves in black communities is reminiscent of colonial-apartheid hermeneutics. Their conduct, devoid of Ubuntu, relegates the culprits to "mere symbols with no substance," in a deeply conditioned state of mental subjugation. Though black, the culprits remain largely unAfrikan in thought. The paper concludes that training for security forces needs to inculcate philosophies of Afrikanism. Furthermore, the paper highlights key lessons to be embraced. Recommendations made include the professionalisation of the security forces, enabling public dialogue, and bringing the culprits to book faster to restore the image of the country, the government, and the security agencies. This paper used a qualitative desktop design that applied inductive analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This discussion relates Gillian Straker's work on the South African apartheid archives to Rawlsian social ethics, and to Margalit's ethics of memory, with special emphasis on her “bystander/beneficiary” formulation. From a psychoanalytic point of view, it questions whether Brombergian dissociation adequately accounts for the pre-dissociative self-loss described by some of the archive participants. Returning to ethics, it invokes Margalit's concept of the moral witness. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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.

The nature of the unfolding social cohesion in previously racially segregated residential spaces has attracted attention since the collapse of apartheid in South Africa and the subsequent transition to democracy in 1994. This paper uses sense of neighbourhood to investigate the emerging social interactions in Cambridge, a former whites-only residential suburb in East London, South Africa. Fitting a binary logistic regression on survey data from a sample of residents of Cambridge, the paper tests the likelihood of race and gender influencing three indicators of the sense of neighbourhood: the sense of safety, trust and norms of reciprocity. The results show that relational dimensions of the sense of neighbourhood differed along racial lines, with low levels of interracial trust mirroring studies elsewhere in the country, and the national-level South African Reconciliation Barometer survey reports. Due to the voluntaristic nature of relational ties, social integration will remain elusive, and regardless of the extent of racial changes, variations in the sense of neighbourhood will characterise the urban residential spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I consider a selection of photographs of a man of color from a luxury book of male nudes, Images (1982), aimed at white gay men and published in South Africa by Alternative Books (AB) in the late apartheid period. Given the exclusive association of assimilable homosexuality with whiteness in the national gay press and other homoerotic commodities available in South Africa at the same historical juncture, I propose that these photographs, which interrupted longstanding, racist homoerotic iconographies, elicited experiences of ambivalence (and thus critical reflection) amongst their historical audiences. To this end, I analyze the editorial and commercial content of the newspapers Link/Skakel and Exit for the period that AB was active (1981–1991), anticipating an overlap of readership between these papers and the publisher's titles. More precisely, I discuss the prevalence of the figure of the "good homosexual" and representations of classical (that is, white) male beauty in these papers to plot how apartheid logic was broadly reproduced (and same-sex desire disciplined according to such dictates) in mainstream South African gay movements, institutions, and print cultures during this time, but, notably, not in Images. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The landscape of professional football in South Africa was drastically altered with the arrival of the National Party's multinational sports policy in the early 1970s. While multinational football was greeted in many quarters as a successful step in breaking down previous barriers to competition between the different racial groups, the controversial nature of these highly racialised encounters led to calls for full integration on the playing field – notably from some white football administrators. This paper will argue that such calls need to be considered on the backdrop of broader developments, in particular events at FIFA's 1974 congress in Frankfurt. During the latter the future expulsion of South Africa from world football's governing body became a distinct possibility. Consequently white football administrators changed strategy and pushed for further integration from the top down. This culminated in a series of quasi-international matches played against an incoming touring team from Argentina in March 1976. The significance of this tour lay in the fact that the South African team was racially mixed, with government approval – a first for football in the country. This event is contextualised within the shifting football landscape in South Africa at the time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing from the author's experience, this Research Note provides an overview of the University of the Western Cape Robben Island Museum Mayibuye Archives. This archive is rooted in the liberation struggle in southern Africa and contains a considerable number of historical documents, oral histories and audio-visual materials documenting the global anti-apartheid movement. Located in Bellville, on the outskirts of Cape Town, South Africa, the archive is easily accessible and well worth a visit from scholars of the Cold War in southern Africa, the global Black freedom struggle and international social movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reads contemporary South Africa through the lens of melancholia and situates the experience of loss at the heart of social entanglements in the country. It argues that the purchase of melancholia lies partly in the fact that the problem of disarticulated and disenfranchised loss is common to post-apartheid modernity in general. It suggests that post-apartheid melancholia is a resultant effect of the country's fraught engagement with loss and (be)longing. It also notes that post-apartheid melancholia is a result of structural traumas and moral anguish that have not been worked through. This paper shows how melancholia manifests in the different modes of attachments to, and identifications with victimhood; it explains why each identity group lays il/legitimate claims to victimhood in South Africa. In addition, this paper conceptualises post-apartheid melancholia along racial and generational lines. That is, it examines the ways in which personal testimonies and meditations shed light on the prospects of white, black and intergenerational melancholia in post-apartheid South Africa. In all, this paper argues that melancholia is an affective structure of the everyday life in post-apartheid South Africa which – if we are not quick to pathologise it – may help combat hurried attempts at closing the door on the past. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors of this paper adopted a transformative framework in this article to examine how the legacy of apartheid continues to manifest within higher education in South Africa. In particular, the authors analyzed (a) how mainstream mentoring knowledge of 'black' and 'marginalized' people have influenced mentoring in post-apartheid South Africa; (b) varied ways in which mentoring initiatives and programs have been silenced and ignored previously marginalized voices through the application of apartheid mentoring knowledge, and (c) shared how the mentors/lecturers and students show and tell their stories about the demands of mentoring and the emphasis of contextual and responsive mentoring for the previously marginalized people in higher education in South Africa. The shortage of mentoring has been cited as a crucial reason for women's lack of advancement in leadership. Implications for advancing transformation through mentoring in higher education in South Africa are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Moses Kotane founded The African Defender in 1937, he did so with the intention to encourage African self-sufficiency through teaching and publishing in indigenous languages and through sharing information on how to survive in segregated South Africa. In doing so, he entered into public conversation with writers and editors of other independent publications such as The Anti-Fascist or occasional series by groups such as the South African Jewish Deputies Board. In the decade after Kotane and his peers began their own discussions, conversations about fascism and anti-fascism in South Africa moved from the margins among those deemed alarmist into spaces where anti-racist activists increasingly saw red flags connecting European oppression with the growing populist nationalism in their own country. This article examines this decade through the language and conversations of independent publications such as Kotane's, in the face of the proliferation of groups such as the Greyshirts, The People's Movement, the South African National Democratic Party ('Blackshirts'), The South African Fascists, and the Gentile Protection League. It argues that anti-fascist philosophies not only informed but served as cornerstones to a nascent anti-apartheid movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-apartheid government in South Africa has provided increased opportunities for public participation at the local government level. Local party politics tend to bedevil these local participatory processes. This paper discusses ANC party politics and how they impact on public participation. It draws on a case study of five municipalities in the Cape Winelands District of the Western Cape that was conducted through semi-structured interviews and secondary data analysis. Local ANC politics has a huge impact on local government structures and their participatory processes. The ANC is a unitary structure in its policy but there is a lack of uniformity in understanding, commitment, and implementation of participatory policies at different levels of the organisation and government spheres. Some deployed public representatives work to advance themselves and their factions, at the expense of the ANC and the communities they are supposed to be leading. The findings of this study have as much significance for civil society as for the local state and its representatives. They show that it is not always the case that the state is bad and civil society is good as leaders of civil society get involved in clientelist relationships and blatant corruption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper takes J.M. Coetzee's "The Mind of Apartheid" as a point of departure in thinking about audits in universities. Using the psychoanalytic framing of apartheid that Coetzee puts in place, audit is likened here to a form of obsessional neurosis. If this is indeed a plausible diagnosis of audits – and this should remain a question for deliberation – then a set of questions emerges for post-apartheid universities, which the paper seeks to develop. By what scenes from the past are audits haunted? What memory traces do audits reactivate? What phantoms do audits seek to exorcise? Can we speak of the demons by which auditing is possessed? And what sort of working through the past would this call for? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two objectives. It aims, firstly, to provide an overview of the explanatory dilemmas that J.M. Coetzee highlights in his acclaimed essay "The mind of apartheid" in respect of existing theories of apartheid ideology. It then makes recourse, secondly, to a series of concepts in Lacanian psychoanalysis so as to shed light on these dilemmas. Two questions seem to particularly vex Coetzee. Firstly, where should we seek to locate agency in respect of apartheid ideology: predominantly on the side of the subject or predominantly the side of structure? Secondly, if we need to appeal both to subject and structure, then how are we to understand the relation between these two factors in the workings of apartheid ideology? By means of Lacanian conceptualisation, the paper supplements and extends Coetzee's argument according to which the notion of desire is central to understanding the spread and hold of apartheid ideology. The paper then moves on to elaborate a Lacanian understanding of ideological agency which accounts for the relation between subject and structure (or, in Lacanian terms, subject and the symbolic Other) and does so by thinking apartheid as a transaction of desire and/or lack between the two. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"The Drama of the Peace Process in South Africa" by Sylvia Neame is a book that reflects on the author's experiences and writings during the late 1980s in South Africa. Neame, a South African historian and former member of the South African Communist Party and African National Congress, provides insights into the ANC's strategy and debates surrounding negotiations with the apartheid regime. The book includes extracts from her diaries, as well as papers she wrote during that time. While the book offers valuable perspectives on the ANC/SACP alliance and the author's efforts to shape the approach to negotiations, it may not appeal to a wide audience due to its length and lack of broader context. [Extracted from the article]

This article explores the pragmatic stance that the United States adopted, during the Nixon era, regarding relations with Pretoria. The Nixon administration believed that Washington needed to prioritise the protection of its own strategic and commercial interests and not become overly concerned about the domestic agenda of its global partners. The vehement anti-communism of the National Party government combined with a profitable economic relationship and the abundant mineral resources of the apartheid state dictated a need on practical grounds for closer ties with South Africa. This stance was further reinforced by Nixon's contempt for sub-Saharan Africans and lack of interest in achieving racial justice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on insights gained from two decades of research on South African heritage and monuments, this paper critically reflects on the status quo of heritage transformation in South Africa 25 years after the end of apartheid. It assesses new directions in national heritage policy and government strategy in relation to recent developments around post-apartheid heritage and the popular demand for a removal of 'colonial statues', which gained impetus from the #Rhodes Must Fall campaign. It is argued that the government's approach to heritage transformation and most notably its treatment of white minority heritage, dominated by the 'juxtaposition model', has had limited success. The paper illustrates how heritage and the memory of the past are entangled with socio-political and economic realities in the present, which in turn is overshadowed by the long-term effects of apartheid and impacted by global or transnational considerations, such as foreign investment and tourism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The argument of this paper is that the search for alternatives to capitalism, the prevailing and dominant socio-economic and political system in South Africa (and elsewhere), is both necessary and urgent, especially because it has failed to meet even the most basic needs and aspirations of the citizenry. In South Africa, this failure is borne out by the fact that despite all the policy reforms, strategies and plans of the post-Apartheid government, the material conditions of the vast majority of people have not met the promise of liberation and may in fact have regressed in some regards. The article examines key elements of the failures of capitalism by reference to a key set of critical indicators, following which it examines some of the foundational ideas about socialism that underpin the emergent solidaristic responses to global corporate capitalism. The final section will deal with the emergence of alternative solidaristic and cooperative forms of social and solidaristic economy in response to the persistent crisis of capitalism and its effects on the global poor and the natural environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages issues of complicated femininity and the representation of such in South African telenovela Gomora. Set in South African township Alexandra, Gomora tells the story of contemporary life in post-apartheid South Africa, where people are forced to engage issues of poverty, inequality, racism, and more. In particular, the paper engages one of the main characters in the program, Nomasonto Mildred Molefe. Mam' Sonto is the matriarch of her family who is also the head of an established hijacking syndicate. Throughout the first season of this show, audiences are able to engage with a complicated woman who is good and bad, kind and cruel. Moving away from a moral reading of the character, this paper unpacks how the character comes to be and how she asserts her own power and agency in engaging a deeply racist and sexist society in order to survive and provide for her family. Engaging works of Pumla Gqola, Sisonke Msimang, Roxanne Gay, and more, the paper presents a reading of this character that enables a clear argument for the need for such depictions of complicated womanhood as part of pushing the reified boundaries of patriarchy that women are forced to exist within. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conservation and political ideology were closely interlinked in apartheid South Africa: forced removals in areas considered important for conservation was a common practice. Post-Apartheid reforms sought to address the injustices of the past, and at the level of policy, the Land Restitution Act of 1994 recognizes the injustices suffered by specific groups during Apartheid providing a framework to address their claims. However, the land claims process is still marked by various injustices. Drawing on life history interviews conducted with 31 members of the Likhayalethu Community, South Africa, as a case study this paper presents an analytical discussion of how the Land Restitution policy framework in South Africa attempts to address the epistemic injustices in the case of claims in protected areas. The paper raises concerns about the capacity of this policy framework to prevent epistemic injustices from continuing to occur through the current land restitution process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the onset of the apartheid era, Jewish women across South Africa began to publish community cookbooks to raise money for Jewish schools, synagogues, and other organizations. Through their combination of recipes, titles, advertisements, prefaces, and guidelines, community cookbooks narrated the economic, social, and cultural successes of the women who compiled them. In the postwar period, South African Jewish women sought a place for themselves in Jewish communal life, and in the white middle class of the country's new apartheid order. By producing and consuming community cookbooks, these women armed themselves with the organizational platform and the cultural capital that would help them claim that place. In order to be able to step into the public sphere while meeting their domestic obligations, they came to rely on the invisibilized labor of the black women who worked in their homes and kitchens. The paper uses cookbooks to think critically about the position of South African Jews in the apartheid system, analyzing how Jewish women benefited from the privileges of whiteness in the intimate arena of their homes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Irma Brenman Pick, a highly respected British psychoanalyst, has passed away at the age of 89. Originally from South Africa, she moved to the UK in 1955 and received training in child psychotherapy and analytic training. She was known for her clinical work, teaching, and supervision, and was a Distinguished Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society. Brenman Pick believed that the analyst's emotional openness to the patient was crucial in therapy, contrary to traditional views that see countertransference as a problem. Her influential paper, "Working Through in the Countertransference," explored how the analyst's work with their own countertransference feelings can deepen the analytic process. [Extracted from the article]

Copyright of Critical African Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Through land restitution, a component of land reform, the state seeks to restore the dignity of black communities who lost their land during colonial and apartheid times. Land restitution seeks to return the land that was unfairly grabbed from black people or to offer alternative land or cash compensation. Much public discourse and research on South African land reform has been on the failure of land reform projects and on land acquisition debates. Little research has been published foregrounding the voices of beneficiaries. By capturing their lived experiences after land transfer, this paper examines whether these beneficiaries have been "restituted." My study in the Macleantown and Salem restitution cases shows that access to land has restored the dignity of beneficiaries and produced nostalgia because of the return of ancestors' land, although the livelihoods of beneficiaries have not improved and these projects have failed to function. I argue that these land compensated beneficiaries have not been properly 'restituted,' because the programme has failed to improve their livelihoods or to produce modern solutions for the restitution programme. Land restitution in these areas has largely not led to land justice because beneficiaries are living in poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Matlala and Matom first began photographing their respective worlds in the 1980s, demand for political images of apartheid overshadowed quotidian concerns. Since then, a shift away from the political to the personal in South African photography has offered a space of reflection for the kinds of images that they sought to make. This paper focuses on the historical, social and political aspects of these two photographers' photo-archives. It attempts to place their work and photographic concerns within the broader archive of South African photography and to demonstrate continuities and ruptures between the past and the present.Photographs are first and foremost, records, and markers of time. Although photographs might be seen to be of their time, of everyday occurrences, they also transcend time. Thus, their relationship to time is necessarily complex, and requires interpretation and analysis within a disciplinary and discursive frame, which in this paper is work and the everyday. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Critical African Studies is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

For many Black South African women, speaking about the gruesome and demeaning treatment they experienced during Apartheid is not easy. Silence became normalized due to the unspeakable nature of what many of the women went through. They struggled to find a way to express their traumas and many lived and continue to live with these hidden transcripts of their lives. For some, shame and lack of safe spaces or platforms to speak/express their traumas contributed to this silence. Indeed, many women continue to struggle to find the language to express their traumas. This paper engages how, through visual narratives such as embroidery, women become active actors in the telling of their lived realities. Drawing from a qualitative approach and using visual narratives in the form of embroideries, the paper offers insights on how unspeakable lived experiences of trauma can be expressed. The paper further highlights ways in which embroidery can be used to connect both the personal and collective stories of Black women in South Africa and to show how suffering is an interpersonal experience. Finally, the possibilities and potentials of visual artwork, as a canvas that offers space for expressing stories of trauma, survival, and healing, are addressed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many European societies, arts education and culture play a central role in their education systems. In England, the situation is very different. There, for the last two decades, the state has progressively marginalised the role of the arts in the public education system in the belief that the 'market' does not value the arts. However, England also has a strong relatively autonomous private education system financed directly by parental fees. This paper explores the extent to which the top private schools have diverged from this process of marginalisation. The findings suggest that these top private schools have invested more in the arts, which have subsequently come to play an increasingly important role in the education they provide. One consequence is that we have witnessed the emergence of two 'systems' of education in England, which pose a significant challenge for cultural policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reflecting on narratives collected as part of the Apartheid Archive Project, a memory project of "ordinary" experiences of living under apartheid, this paper engages with stories that articulate white South Africans' shame/ful relationships with Black female domestic workers. It is increasingly of concern that the dominant response to apartheid abuses are to consider them "in the past" in order to avoid discomforting reminders. Shame and its silencing effect, as feminist and other critical literature shows, is bound up with relations of power, legitimating privilege and subjugation. Yet, shame may also be deployed as narrative strategy to deal with subjective discomfort and guilt by those seeking to disentangle themselves from association with social privilege and its abuses. How do we respond to narratives that may have both effects? Drawing on contemporary critical pedagogies, such as the work of Zembylas that specifically engage with the affective turn, and guided by Probyn's argument that shame is a powerful resource of social critique, this paper suggests productive possibilities of such narratives in contemporary South Africa. While acknowledging contestations, an argument is made for the value of stories of shame/shaming towards troubling the erasure of apartheid and its continuities in the present while also disrupting the denial of historical and current complicity with power and privilege. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The South African commercial press marginalises alternative and counter-hegemonic voices partly due to its location in the capitalist power structures. Notwithstanding its transformation post-apartheid, the ethos of this media remains rooted in apartheid-like economic and ideological rationalities. This media still functions within Western news values and a neoliberal paradigm; hence, the reporting of ideological discourses delegitimises the concerns of the dispossessed. This paper uses the critical political economy of the media in conversation with decolonial theories to analyse the media's representation of the land debate by assessing economic and political interrelations that shape its structures and practice. Stories in the South African English-language print media in 2018 are analysed using thematic and framing approaches. It emerges that the land debate is framed negatively. The media employed a narrow neoliberal frame in the stories and thus failed to support a legitimate discourse. Instead, the media gave voice to individuals located in capitalist production structures who defended the status quo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Documentary photography has undergone a process of devaluation in post-apartheid South Africa. In response, Patricia Hayes has introduced the term "empty photographs" into the scholarly conversation, using it to designate images that have been derided as "'bad,' 'boring,' or repetitious" in post-apartheid settings ("The Uneven Citizenry," 189). This article revisits a subset of such images to contest their seeming emptiness—pallbearers escorting dead activists to their graves during political funerals in late-apartheid South Africa. Focusing specifically on Afrapix photographer, Gille de Vlieg's images of Themba Dlamini's funeral in Driefontein in 1990, the paper restores their local history to view and unpacks the visual cultural and material cultural circuits of militant mourning in which they were embedded. It then uses various orders of metonymy in the visual field to comment on the "necropolitics" of the apartheid regime (Achille Mbembe, "Necropolitics"). The paper concludes with a reflection on Ariella Azoulay's notion of the "civil gaze" (Civil Imagination) and considers what unfolds when a reckoning with the differential distribution of death that characterizes necropower reorients this faculty away from the individual photograph towards series, genre or corpus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Dispossession is characteristically associated with the period of colonialism and apartheid in South Africa. Consequently, not much consideration is given to how the previously marginalised continue to be dispossessed in their everyday lives by coal mining activities in the current political dispensation. This article reframes dispossession as a perpetual post-apartheid experience in African communities. In this paper, dispossession does not only encompass events of deprivation, and the loss of land and property, but also covers the loss of the incorporeal. The relocation of African ancestral graves in Tweefontein (Ogies) is discussed as an aspect of dispossession. The politics surrounding household relocations and grave exhumations illustrates how communities not only lose the material; land and tombs, but also lose their intangible possessions; ancestral connection, identity, heritage and belonging because of mining. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the emergence of the Black Students' Movement (BSM), a black organization formed at Rhodes University in the 1980s. The BSM aligned its anti-apartheid politics with the United Democratic Front (UDF) and black consciousness philosophy. It emerged due to the conservative disposition of the Student Representative Council (SRC), and sought to address both the issues that black students faced on campus and to draw attention to the broader political context of the time. The central argument of the paper is that the BSM, as an anti-apartheid students' organization, used protest as a tool to represent the issues of black students at Rhodes. This paper demonstrates that the BSM's demands were largely recognised by the Rhodes senate, and its politics created small but significant changes in the university's policies. During the 2015 period, Rhodes University once again saw a formation of a new BSM, raising the issues of 'decolonization' and transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a response to a paper written by Albie Sachs titled "Preparing Ourselves for Freedom." The author responds to the key issues in the paper including a definition of South Africa, apartheid, and Sachs' views on culture. Also discussed are art and censorship in South Africa, and other responses to Sachs' paper.

Given the recent oppressive histories of apartheid and colonialism, the legacies of slavery in South Africa are often overlooked in thinking about aspects of post-apartheid democracy's discursive formulation of race, nation, and reconciliation. This paper analyses how two examples in Cape Town – the permanent exhibition Representing Slavery at the Slave Lodge Museum and the Memorial to the Enslaved in Church Square – represent the historic event of slavery in South Africa. The paper argues that the museum exhibition and the memorial site are instances of memorialisation and simultaneously function as political processes that offer insight into discourses of race and reconciliation in South Africa during the early stages of democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In South Africa the segregation laws of the apartheid years had an impact on contacts and interactions between cultural groups, which led to prejudice, intolerance and painful intercultural experiences. The influence of the past is still evident in present-day South African society, despite greater mobility between different cultural groups. This paper reports on four research studies that investigated how social work and the arts together can explore ways to facilitate contact between diverse groups that will lead to positive experiences. The aim of these studies was to create an opportunity to develop intercultural awareness through joint music-making in an attempt to address prejudice and intolerance. The paper will firstly discuss how a transdisciplinary approach can be utilised. Secondly, the paper posits that making music together is a way to assist diverse groups to explore their own cultural understandings, to 'hear the voices' of other cultures, and to move towards greater intercultural awareness that could enhance tolerance in a diverse society. Thirdly, the hermeneutical perspective will be presented as an aspect of the process to support the development of awareness between diverse groups. Concluding recommendations focus on how making music together can become a form of intercultural social work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores Duncan Bell's heuristic of the mythscape as a means to conceptualize the nationalistic narrativization of the sporting past. Bell approaches the forging of national identity through evocations of the past as mythologized: that is, partial, contested, power-laden, and perpetually mutating. First, we introduce Bell's concept as a means to evaluate the selective, contested and shifting construction of the sporting past through the prism of nationalism. We first chart the narrativisation of the New Zealand – South African rugby rivalry within popular literature during the apartheid era (1948–1994). This was characterized by the production of 'governing' myths and oppositional narrations from the 1960s onward. We then evaluate subsequent post-apartheid narrativizations (1994 onwards) within popular rugby histories, focussing on the 1986 Cavaliers rugby tour to South Africa – the final event in apartheid-era rugby ties between the two nations. We explore how writers use particular narratives, and what they have chosen to exclude, and how it informs a national mythscape. We find the rehabilitation of governing myths that sanitize and redact connections between New Zealand rugby and apartheid. This is symptomatic of a selective construction that valorizes rugby as a idealized national institution. Finally, we offer comments on the utility of the mythscapes concept. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

[T]here is not one distribution of income but many: income is distributed across racial groups, income classes, present and future generations, and so on. Moreover, a given distribution is not a one-dimensional magnitude: it has as many dimensions or components as there are relevant 'classes' (Bromberger 1982, p. 166). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The successes recorded against apartheid sport are lauded and celebrated. These remain a touchstone for progressive social change and are considered a model for contemporary action. This paper uses Sir Stanley Matthews as a case study of an English sports superstar and household name across the footballing world, who benefitted from apartheid but also vacillated and seemingly opposed the system. Autobiographies, biographies, contemporary accounts and films all suggested that he challenged the status quo, while this article contends the opposite. More broadly, this article argues that while the struggle against apartheid sport recorded significant victories, a reassessment of international sports contact during this period is necessary. By carrying out such a reassessment, a more layered, nuanced and complex understanding is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a temporal and spatial 'sojourn' through a single photograph taken by Daniel Morolong in the 1960s on the beachside in East London, a port city located in the Eastern Cape. It depicts six subjects who re-enact the sixteenth-century Italian 'Neptune fountains', which included mythological figures such as the god of water, water nymphs, and satyrs. The figure of the satyr on the fountains alluded to the theatre genre of the satyr-play in antiquity, which often took place by the seashore. One of its key motifs was the satyrs' quest to navigate unfamiliar surroundings they encountered far from home. Morolong's photograph is a part of a series that were used by their subjects to make claims for belonging in the context of apartheid-era forced removals from the city. This essay considers how the photograph is a performance in a quest to return home precisely through the subjects' invocation of satyrs, and, in turn, it reflects on how the photograph as a technological medium that is marked by water in both literal and figurative ways, is too a 'satyrical' object. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary diffusion of a 'spy culture' and other legitimated forms of citizen to citizen monitoring in society has arguably impacted on the area of romantic relationships. This may be particularly exacerbated in relationships that defy societal norms such as is the case with interracial romantic relationships. The surveillance of romantic choices by parents and friends has called on interracial couples to redouble efforts to safeguard their intimacy. Using the idea of 'Foucaultdian' surveillance as a conceptual starting point, this paper argues that interracial couples in post-apartheid South Africa face barriers to intimacy through the perceived and realized surveillance of their relational choices by friends and family. Findings from in-depth interviews suggest that the staying power of racial primacy in contemporary South Africa leads friends and families of interracial couples to assume the role of gatekeepers thereby instilling a strategically empowering form of self-watching in the couples as to when and how to disclose their relationship status. The study aids in the broader conceptual re-imagining of what it means to watch and be watched within the societal confines of racialized close social network dynamics. Limitations and implications for future research are also offered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) rejects the classical political economy distinction between productive and unproductive labor, the latter defined as all labor that does not produce surplus-value. Rather, much non-commodified labor, particularly that done in the domestic sphere, is not unproductive but necessary since it produces labor-power. Hence, SRT has proposed an alternative distinction: productive versus reproductive spheres of labor. This article argues that this opposition too is analytically and politically misleading. Capital is concerned with profit, not with the reproduction of the living labor within which labor-power is always embedded. It is the everyday struggles of living labor that determines its reproduction. These take place not just in the kin-based sphere of the family but in overlapping, shifting places and processes, including struggles for better wages and working conditions in capitalist firms. This paper uses two different contexts in southern Africa to make this argument: an influential debate over how to understand changes in apartheid in South Africa in the 1970s; and a sugar-cane plantation in Mozambique where interdependent contradictions of class, gender and race defined a social division of labor that systematically compromised the reproduction of living labor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This is a paper on student mobilisation or youth activism in South Africa from a critical race theory, black consciousness and cultural studies perspective with an emphasis on meaning construction, symbolic action and locating the author centrally in the empirical-analytical process. It is presented through the personalised experiences and reflexive-narrative style (i.e. story-within-the-story) of the author's own point of view, which makes it an auto- (personal experience), ethno- (rich cultural and historical context) -graphic (descriptive and visual) piece. Using the autoethnographic method of narrating observations in the field, at the event of the 23 October 2015 "Fees-must-fall" gathering at the Union Buildings in Pretoria, the paper offers a reflexive comparison of the experiences of the author present at two distinct (but historically related, i.e. past related to present and vice versa) political junctures of student mobilisation for higher education in South Africa—first as a student in the late 1980s and then as a passive observer-cum-social science researcher at the 2015 student protests at the Union Buildings, in Pretoria. In adopting this novel qualitative method of interrogating student mobilisation from a personal experiential point of view, this paper offers a different approach to reporting qualitative field research that conventionally presents the ideas and opinions of its participants as the main interrogation point, not that of the author's. The main narrative is therefore premised on the author's own experiences with student mobilisation for educational reform during the height of apartheid and under this current democratic social context of the "hashtag fees-must-fall" (#FMF) movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the range of functions undertaken by the University of Fort Hare (UFH) over its 100-year history and in what ways it has carried these out. Drawing on the framework developed by Castells on the functions performed by universities, the paper shows that UFH’s role in three of these functions - namely, in the production of values for individuals and social legitimation for the state, in the formation of the dominant elite, and in the training of the labour force - has shifted and changed along with the different imperatives and conditions of the colonial, apartheid and post-1994 democratic eras in South Africa. By contrast, UFH’s role in the production of scientific knowledge is a relatively recent development, but one which has strengthened rapidly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the impact of a large social regime change on well-being independently from the change's direct impact on observable outcomes. While individuals get utility from outcomes, they may also get 'procedural' utility from the processes by which outcomes arise. We apply a Blinder-Oaxaca decomposition to models of life satisfaction before and after the end of apartheid. The results suggest that the increase in life satisfaction seen in South Africa following apartheid's end should not be attributed to improvements in socioeconomic outcomes, but to changes in the well-being derived from given levels of these outcomes. This suggests that processes and institutions have important impacts on life-satisfaction independently from their direct influence on outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article considers the ways in which characters are presented as "out of place" in different apartheid city spaces in anti-apartheid era films of the late 1980s: A Dry White Season (1989, dir. Euzhan Palcy) and Mapantsula (1988, dir. Oliver Schmitz) and, to a lesser degree, Cry Freedom (1987, dir. Richard Attenborough). The article explores the manner in which the protagonists relate to each other through interracial friendship, relationality and mobility in the domestic spaces of cities and townships. It reads these relations as occupying and redefining apartheid sensibilities in distinct ways that filter into how postapartheid sensibilities are and can be navigated. The paper thus grapples with how seemingly fixed apartheid spaces and characters in the films can also be part of complex, real-life repositionings of racial identities in postapartheid South Africa that are not always clear and/or neat. The paper therefore argues that through their representations of the past, these films perform memory work and map our memories and historical constructions of apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article re-examines existing interpretations of the ANC's economic and social policy choices during the negotiations that led to South Africa's democracy. The divergence but also convergence crucially in economic policy thinking of key policy actors within the ANC and the National Party (NP) led apartheid regime is contrasted. The National Party's economic policy agenda is discussed with attention to its key 'technocratic' policy actors and how they influentially negotiated neo-liberal policy positions with the ANC. The economic and social policies of the ANC must be seen in contrast as part of a series of attempts historically at advocating social democratic oriented policies. The ANC leadership however marginalised and abandoned these ideas and policies in a social democratic vein in the consensus seeking transition era. The paper tries to explain these shifts and to come to grips with the complexity of the actors, history and politics of ANC policy thinking in the transition era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Africa is rapidly urbanising and urban food systems are being transformed. Some have argued that this transformation is driven by a supermarket revolution akin to that in North America, Europe and Latin America. Others suggest that the supermarket revolution model oversimplifies complex African realities and that urban food systems are experiencing uneven supermarket penetration in the face of resilient informal food sectors. This paper focuses on Windhoek, Namibia, showing that the city's food system is dominated by South African and local supermarket chains. Since the end of apartheid, South African supermarket chains have expanded their operations into Namibia. Supermarket domination of Windhoek's urban food system is a function of proximity of South Africa and integration into South African supply chains. In other African countries, supermarket penetration has been much slower and is even being reversed. Explanations for uneven penetration in different countries require greater contextualisation and more case study research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]