Search

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]

Ubuntu has been defined as a moral quality of human beings, as a philosophy or an ethic, as African humanism, and as a worldview. This paper explores these definitions as conceptual tools for understanding the cultural, educational, and philosophical landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this understanding is the Althusserian concept of state apparatus. Louis Althusser divides the state apparatus into two forces: the repressive state apparatus (RSA); and the ideological state apparatus (ISA). RSAs curtail the working classes, predominately through direct violence or the threat of violence, whereas ISAs function primarily by ideology, including forms of organised religion, the education system, family units, legal systems, trade unions, political parties, and media. This paper discusses the link between increasing inequality in post-apartheid South Africa and education, with specific reference to Althusser's ISAs and the abuse of Ubuntu as a subterfuge for socio-economic inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars examining racial stereotyping and prejudice in racially organised social systems have largely focused on how non-White ethnic and racial groups experience racial stereotyping in White-majority national contexts such as the US, Australia and European countries. There is only scant scholarship on experiences of ethno-racial communities in Black-majority countries such as South Africa, a country where Whites are a minority. Even though there is ample scholarly work on racial stereotyping of racial groups in South Africa such as Coloured people, much of it is focused on their experiences during colonial and Apartheid eras. Little is understood about how Coloured people experience racial stigmatisation in post-Apartheid South Africa. This paper addresses this gap. Based on interviews with fourteen Coloured participants from Westbury, Johannesburg, this study found that many interviewees claimed that Coloured South Africans were negatively racially stereotyped as people who use drugs, as aggressive and violent people, as alcoholics and as criminals. Many participants also resisted and countered the negative stereotypes by talking about Coloured people in positive ways, which shows their agency. The negative stereotyping of Coloured people which prevailed during colonial and Apartheid times is still deployed by society to describe Coloured people in post-Apartheid South Africa. To capture the continuity of negative stereotyping in South Africa about Coloured people, I developed the analytical term of 'perpetual racial stereotyping'. Many decades after the end of the Apartheid system, negative racial stereotyping of Coloured South Africans still continues in everyday life, and Coloured people are still associated with racist prejudices, narratives, discourses and stereotypes that were invented many decades ago by settler colonialism and Apartheid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Xenophobia in South Africa is often depicted as anti-immigrant sentiments and stereotypes that emanate from social, political, and economic misconceptions. This paper argues that though the causes of xenophobia are many and complex, they stem from the dashed hopes of independence and the legacy of apartheid. This narrative has over the years been overshadowed by the view that xenophobic attacks in South Africa are a product of hate and anti-migration. We argue that the failure of successive governments of the ANC to correct the wrongs of the apartheid past and make the economy inclusive has stoked the tensions between citizens and foreign nationals. To underscore this point, this paper undertakes a discussion on the pertinent implications of the political trajectory of xenophobia in South Africa and makes some recommendations on what can be done to reduce incidences of xenophobic attacks in the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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]

This paper takes the form of a deeply personal narrative, relating the story of how early community activism prompted a career of over two decades in urban planning in a post-apartheid metropolitan Council in South Africa. It shows how a sense of frustration with a system that was unable to facilitate the spatial restructuring of an unequal urban form, prompted the transition towards becoming a critical researcher within the local state apparatus. It reveals how attempts to speak truth to power through research that could uncover unexplored complexities, contestations and dubious local state practices, whilst still in the employ of the institution was at best, challenging. Through the use of real examples from planning practice, the paper unpacks and carefully documents four key considerations that make such embedded research difficult. In sharing the lessons learned from the aborted research project, it then suggests what type of research is possible by picking up the story of a second attempt at "safer research". It wraps up the story with new insights, this time from a perspective as a recent-outsider — not as a stranger though, but as one of the local state's own. Whilst appreciating the value of distance in undertaking research, it speaks to the power of familiarity and trusted ties, and the legitimacy that comes with being a credible outsider. At the same time, it also reflects on the possible challenges associated with being such an outsider. Through critical reflection on the process of doing research inside and outside of the local state, the paper suggests that differential positioning can significantly affect the depth of insights around state practices in urban governance. [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]

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]

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]

Inspired by Karen Barad's agential realism and Donna Haraway's use of the Chthulucene, our paper profoundly troubles and unsettles the humanist subject that has been the cause of so much trouble. Re-turning to a government primary school in Cape Town as the "research site," we adopt temporal and spatial diffraction as a postqualitative research methodology. The colonial practices related to land ownership, are not in the past, but remain in its be(com)ing. Land "use" in South Africa during Apartheid, was, and still is, a form of violence. Thinking-with Neimanis and McLauchlan, we understand a school as not separate from the phenomenon of climate change, but as one of its sites and as a feminist project. A diffractive image articulates aesthetically and politically how the land as the more-than-human is a significant part of the phenomenon and queers school as a concept and "research site." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Across the Jewish world religious polarization is gaining momentum. At the secular end of the spectrum people are switching away from religion while at the religious pole fertility levels are high. This trend is evident among South African Jewry; data from the 2019 Jewish Community Survey of South Africa (N = 4193) show that the community is becoming polarized, and the traditional center ground is collapsing. However, unlike many other Jewish communities today, switching toward more religious subgroups than the one in which one was raised is more common in South Africa than switching away from them. This tendency is most pronounced among people born in the 1960s and 1970s. A similar trend characterizes South African non-Jews. We argue that coming of age in a period of profound political and social instability explains the increased likelihood of switching toward religion. The effect is more marked among Jews due to distinct communal characteristics and history that provided the optimal conditions for switching towards a more religious lifestyle. This paper highlights the necessity of examining internal processes that are unique to the Jewish community alongside broader developments to improve our understanding of religious polarization among Jews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an ethnographic exploration of working-class commuter cyclists on Rudolf Greyling (RG) Street in Bloemfontein, Free State, South Africa. The historical significance of this street/road is that it traversed a 'buffer zone'. In apartheid town planning, buffer zones were areas that, in the absence of physical or man-made boundaries, separated mono-racial areas designated as such under the Group Areas Act (Davies 1981). Today, these old buffer zones continue to map the distances that working people, living in low-income residential locations, cover to reach economic opportunities. For 3 weeks in the month of September 2018, we spent our mornings and evenings, walking, observing, and speaking, to the cyclists who rode along RG Street. Engaging with the stories cyclists of RG Street shared with us, we discuss how physical and metaphorical buffer zones of the past shape the experiences and concerns of working-class cyclists in the present. As much as the use of a bicycle to commute helped save money, riding along the roads decidedly not designed for cyclists exposed conditions of adversity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While objective class dynamics have received much attention in South Africa, less is known about the subjective social positions individuals place themselves in. For example, in a highly unequal society like South Africa, some individuals would overestimate (inflate) or underestimate (deflate) their social position compared to their objective class position. This paper aims to provide further information on status inconsistency in South Africa by assessing some of the socioeconomic determinants of bias perceptions. Using International Social Survey Programme (ISSP) data and a multinomial probit model, the results show that education and race play a significant role in influencing the biased perceptions of individuals in South Africa. For example, individuals with higher education levels have a stronger tendency to deflate their social position, while Coloreds, Indians/Asians, and whites tend to inflate their social positions more than Africans. The results indicate the vital role of race and education in determining status inconsistencies in a society that is still suffering from high levels of racial and education inequality due to the lingering legacy of apartheid. The results provide a better understanding to policymakers and government on the dynamics behind social status perceptions in South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses relations between South Africa and Southern Rhodesia from 1939 to 1948. The article begins in 1939 when the outbreak of the Second World War brought mixed fortunes for the two neighbours. For Southern Rhodesia, which relied mainly on imported manufactured goods from the United Kingdom, the war induced shortages resulting in huge domestic demand. Shortages stimulated calls for local industry to fill the vacuum. Consequently, an import substitution industrialisation (ISI) drive developed. In addition to the ISI, South Africa, which had a comparatively established secondary industry by the time the war broke out, increasingly became an essential source for Southern Rhodesian imports. This, however, was not without its challenges. Southern Rhodesia's economic interest groups often raised complaints against South Africa's economic competition and its threat to the Rhodesian economy. Nonetheless, Pretoria and Salisbury worked closely and found ways to ease the challenges. By 1948, the end date of the paper, Southern Rhodesia and South Africa's relationship had resulted in the signing of a Customs Union Agreement. Thus, the article demonstrates, thematically and chronologically, that relations between the two countries evolved through cooperation and competition during the Second World War until the onset of Apartheid in South Africa and the Customs Agreement. The paper relies on primary material from the Zimbabwean and South African archives comprised of correspondences of Customs Agreements negotiations, economic policies and relations, and Parliamentary debates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Redressing the wrongs of the past has been a central theme in democratic South Africa. The land restitution programme was specifically intended to foster the process of redressing the loss and pain inflicted through racially motivated and violent dispossession of land. After more than two and half decades of implementing the land restitution programme, there are serious questions around how far this programme has contributed to redressing the injustices of the past. This paper, drawing from three land restitution case studies, illustrates that while many victims of colonial and apartheid land dispossession have been compensated, the land restitution process has scored limited success in redressing past injustices. The paper argues that the failure to substantively redress colonial and apartheid land dispossession is partly due to the narrow conceptualization of the restitution programme, which has emphasized procedural aspects, ignoring the need for meaningful redress of the victims of land dispossession. As a result of this, the land restitution programme has not fulfilled its transformative objectives of reconciliation, reconstruction, and reducing land inequalities in the country. [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 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]

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]

This paper explores the extent to which land ownership through restoration results in non-sustainability in the Nonoti community in South Africa. During the apartheid era, Black communities were evicted from their ancestral land to make way for tourism development, though those lands were later repossessed by their original owners. This study aims at exploring the challenges of post-settlement after land restoration to new landowners in the Nonoti Beach resort. This paper is anchored on the sustainable livelihoods theoretical framework to measure the extent to which land can enhance socio-economic development. This study adopted a qualitative research design using in-depth interviews and focus groups. The sample of this study was drawn from the Nonoti local community members and representatives of the government agencies in charge of land restoration. The study concludes that landowners should be capacitated through training and skills development to live sustainably on the land they have acquired through the land claims process. [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]

Climate change and global warming have led to an increased incidence of flooding across the world. Against the backdrop of the recent devastating floods in the Kwazulu-Natal province of South Africa, this paper explores psychotraumatology of natural disasters. In particular, we explore the impact of internal migration in South Africa, as well as apartheid spatial planning and inequality on the consequences of the flooding. We also focus on the psychotraumatology resulting from flooding, in general, and in particular on the victims of the flooding in the KwaZulu-Natal province of South Africa. We conclude that the psychopathological consequences of such natural disasters are ignored even though they seriously affect the people concerned. The development of specific trainings for psychologists in psychotraumatology and the care of victims should be a priority in the future. [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]

Colonialism has had an influence on many sectors across the board in South Africa, including the prison system. Its impact could be seen in the way prisoners were treated during the post-colonial and apartheid eras. This paper seeks to demonstrate the relationship between colonial, post-colonial, and apartheid penological practices by examining the treatment of prisoners during these periods. The examination of this relationship may be useful to understand what really informed the promulgation of racist policies during the post-colonial and apartheid periods. This paper contends that the legislation that was promulgated during the post-colonial and apartheid periods, which comprised legislative instruments on how prisoners were treated, was in fact a formalisation and continuation of what had already been practised during the colonial era. The following themes are central to this discourse: the colonial period between the 1840s and 1909, the post-colonial period between 1910 and 1948, and the National Party (apartheid) era between 1948 and 1993. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper seeks to create a theoretical link between land reform and development as a means to alleviate poverty in South Africa, particularly in rural areas. The then apartheid regime used unjust laws to violently dispossess the indigenous black South African landowners of their land and distributed the land to the whites who utilised them for different socio-economic purposes including farming. Methodologically this paper used a literature review (qualitative) research approach to assess the extent to which the redistributed land to the blacks have been put to use for productive purposes to alleviate poverty, create jobs and combat hunger in South Africa. The democratic dispensation which started in 1994-ushered in a black majority government, black South Africans are now clamouring for the return of all the land that was illegally acquired by the white South Africans during the apartheid regimes. To this end, previously dispossessed blacks were given back some of their lands for productive usage. Some of the findings include the following: various land reforms laws, policies, measures, strategies have dismally failed due to corruption, nepotism, charisma and patronage. In conclusion, the paper points out that land reforms were embarked upon to eradicate the land injustices and inequalities of apartheid and to alleviate poverty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Nelson Mandela Bridge is one of South Africa's monuments at the centre of the drive to foster urban transformation in the city of Johannesburg. It stands out as one of the monumental emblems of transformation after the disappearance of administrative and occupational apartheid. On the one hand, the bridge is used consciously and unconsciously, to rehearse the ideals of democracy by harping on the towering image of Nelson Mandela as a struggle hero. On the other hand, the bridge is 'one of the prestigious projects at the centre of city-marketing and branding'. This article explores three dimensions of representation of the bridge in terms of what Stuart Hall refers to as reflective, intentional and constructivist meaning. The paper does this by examining how these meanings are produced and ordered, as well as, the knowledge, norms and practices that structure the new system of meaning in South Africa. The main argument of the paper is that the South African post-apartheid development ideology of reconstruction embedded in the struggle memory has become a platform on which the sign value of the NMB has become a rhetorical device for the appropriation of commercial interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1935 the Dutch Reformed Church (DRC) accepted its federal mission policy which had racial segregation enshrined in it as a core and divinely sanctioned principle. As the foremost missiologist within South African church circles during the middle half of the 20th Century, Gustav Bernhard Augustus Gerdener was the chief formulator and disseminator of this policy. Convinced that the future fate of South Africa's multi-racial society rested squarely on evangelisation, white guardianship, and mission work, Gerdener lobbied for secular racial theory to be based on the formula of the DRC mission church. By 1946 this racial theory espoused by Gerdener, as well as the majority DRC, was internationally questioned by the post-World War Two onset of general human rights and rapid decolonialisation spearheaded by the newly constituted United Nations Organisation. This paper sets out to track the influence Gerdener had on the formulation of the DRC mission policy. It will make the case that as advocate of this policy and through his position as chairman of the DRC Federal Mission Council Gerdener played a critical role during the incubation years of the apartheid ideology leading up to the nationalist's political victory in 1948. Finally, it will aim to elucidate the justification for apartheid which Gerdener's racial theory afforded to a religious nation. A justification which formed the moral bedrock of South Africa's opposition to the broader international context of decolonialisation and advocation of a domestic social system guised as one geared toward equal, albeit separate, development but which ultimately proved to be a new strain of colonialism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Bantustans were created during the apartheid period of South Africa's history and represented one of the key pillars of planning for 'grand apartheid'. A major challenge was the promotion of economic development in these territories in order to give them a facade of economic legitimacy. Four of the ten Bantustan ethno-states eventually acceded to the grant of 'independence' which created a changed environment for territorial economic development. The article explores a transition in economic development planning by the apartheid state from Bantustan industrialization to a focus on tourism and casino resort developments as a potential driver of Bantustan economic progress. In terms of methods and sources the paper applies an historical approach that blends secondary sources with primary documentary material. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Territorial administrative restructuring and the redrawing of municipal boundaries was undertaken in South Africa to address the apartheid legacy of major social, economic and spatial inequalities. A significant consequence of territorial administrative restructuring was that the boundaries of certain South African metropolitan areas were expanded such that they incorporate vast rural geographies. These spaces pose particular challenges for metropolitan planning. The aim in this paper is to examine the resultant planning challenges which confront South Africa's extended metropolitan spaces. Among several consequences was the imperative for metropolitan authorities to build new competences in order to plan and manage these added rural spaces as well as the peri-urban spaces. The analysis is contextualised within an international literature on planning in extended metropolitan spaces and of peri-urban spaces. [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 paper examines the extent to which globalisation has affected the post-apartheid state's ability to fulfil the right to adequate houses enshrined in the South African Constitution (Act 108 of 1996). Underpinned by the rights-based approach to development (RBAD) which provides a mechanism to promote, protect, and fulfil various rights, the study employed a quantitative methodology. A survey was the preferred data collection method and a questionnaire was used as the data collection instrument. The probability sampling technique of random cluster sample was used in the study and the Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS) was used to analyse questionnaires focusing primarily on descriptive statistics. The sample size consisted of 500 survey respondents selected from two towns in the Buffalo City Metropolitan Municipality in the Eastern Cape Province. We used an alpha level of.05 for all statistical tests. The study was premised on the following null hypothesis (H0): the right to housing is equally distributed among the population. The findings indicate that the right to houses is not equally distributed among the population, X2 (2, N = 500) = 56.37, p <.05. Therefore, the null hypothesis (H0) is rejected. We can conclude, therefore, that there is a statistically significant difference amongst the groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1964, the UK government imposed an arms embargo on South Africa, which it maintained until the end of the white minority rule. What explains this embargo? Using mainly archival evidence, this paper demonstrates that domestic political dynamics in the United Kingdom mediated the influence of the transnational anti-apartheid and anti-colonial struggles on the British government. The United Kingdom imposed and maintained this embargo due in part to a domestic advocacy network, whose hub was the Anti-Apartheid Movement. The paper provides a comprehensive explanation of an important issue in British foreign policy, the anti-colonial struggle, and Southern Africa's history. There are theoretical implications for foreign policy analysis concerning the role of advocacy networks, interactions between local and global activism, the role of political parties' ideology and contestation, the effects on foreign policy of changes in a normative environment, the effects of norm contestation, and normative determinants of sanctions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ten years after the conclusion of World War II, the Department of Native Affairs of the National Party government of South Africa sponsored research into the selection of African civil servants. The study was conducted by Rae Sherwood, under the auspices of the National Social Research Council, and the National Institute for Personnel Research. In 1960, Sherwood submitted the work to the University of tine Witwatersrand to obtain a PhD degree. Two government departments objected to the award of the degree. In this paper I recount the history of the research, explaining that the acceleration of the apartheid project between 1948 and 1961 played a significant role in the controversy that developed. The paper furthermore illustrates the difficulties faced by social scientific research under repressive political conditions, and the need for a more nuanced view of the psychological research of the National Institute for Personnel Research in South Africa at the time. Significance: * The history of South Africa's research organisations has been of interest for a long time. This study recalls the history of an unknown chapter in the history of the National Institute for Personnel Research, based on a PhD submission kept under embargo in the archives of the University of the Witwatersrand. The study was methodologically sophisticated. rich in data; but controversial in its findings, at least as it reflected on the policies pursued by the apartheid government after World War II. It adds another contextual element to the type ot work conducted by the Institute. [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]

The concept of reconciliation as a political-psychological concept came into being at the beginning of the nineties of the last century. It took a lot of time for the experts, who were engaged in peacebuilding in the post-conflict period, to understand that political, economic and other social processes were not sufficient for the reconciliation process, but that psychological aspects of reconciliation should also be included. In such a way, the process of reconciliation, in which subjects of reconciliation are race, people, nations, was lowered from the collective to the individual level. An example of such an attempt relates to the events after the apartheid in the South African Republic and the establishment of the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation. In this regard, this paper aims to identify the basic ideas and principles of the reconciliation process in the South African Republic and try to place it in the context of reconciliation between formerly warring parties in the former Yugoslavia. In the analysis of the concept of reconciliation that has been relatively successfully applied in the South African Republic, three key ideas have been identified. The first idea suggests that the process of reconciliation from the level of "political elites" should be lowered to the level of "ordinary people". The second, it is necessary to have a so-called Third party for the reconciliation process that will manage the whole process. And the third, that the truth is an unavoidable factor in the process of reconciliation. In this paper, a proposal for a possible model of reconciliation among the countries and nations of the former Yugoslavia is given on the basis of analysis of the post-conflict processes in the South African Republic and current events in the post-Yugoslav space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses South Africa's Covid relief plan for its creative sector—the Presidential Employment Stimulus Plan (PESP)—as a locus for understanding the evolution of state arts sponsorship since the country's first free elections in 1994. It begins with an historical discussion outlining the evolution of various philosophies of national arts sector caretaking. Particular attention is drawn to the philosophical shift from democratic aspirations during the transition from apartheid in the early 1990s to the sector's steady integration into a broader neoliberal development strategy leading up to the present. National policy papers and development programs from the last two decades demonstrate the steady entrenchment of an economistic approach to the arts, decoupled from principles argued for during the transition to democracy such as education, national cohesion, or cultural representation. Structural dynamics governing the creative sector are crossed by the political prerogatives of artists who rely on state arts funding. To explain the tension between government care regimes for creative and cultural industries intersect with historically situated philosophies of how the arts intervene in communities facing crisis, we end our discussion through an analysis of a project funded by the PESP: i-Yeza, the Covid-19 Awareness Roadshow. Pivoting from macro-level discussion of arts policy to ethnographic analysis of this specific project's conception and reception demonstrates how community consciousness diverges from neoliberalism's instrumental logic. By linking the legacy of socially critical township theatre to Covid awareness and vaccination, i-Yeza performs a politics of care premised on a vision of national moral redemption despite state decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the career of the prominent intellectual and activist Zachariah Keodirelang Matthews and his efforts to promote higher education for black South Africans during the mid-twentieth century. Popular narratives of South African history often tend to downplay or discredit the moderation, pragmatism and cultural diversity of Matthews and his generation and instead emphasize the growth of black solidarity and militancy, but study of Matthews’ writings reveals the important role of old liberal ideas in African nationalism, including an enduring faith in the power of knowledge and an expectation that justice would eventually prevail. The life and work of Z.K. Matthews demonstrates how an African teacher and scholar could steadfastly resist European domination while simultaneously maintaining belief in the essential oneness of humanity and hope for the future of South Africa. [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]

Apartheid left in its wake a South Africa characterized by social inequalities that are embedded and reflected in all spheres of social life, including the higher education system. While the post-apartheid government has made efforts to transform the higher education system it inherited, the pace has been slow and has fallen significantly short of what many regard as modest expectations. This paper interrogates why transformation has remained elusive in the higher education sector in post-apartheid South Africa, particularly with regards to the institutional culture at historically white universities (HWUs). Focusing on the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF) campaign at the University of Cape Town (UCT), and Luister, a documentary film at the University of Stellenbosch, it employs critical race theory (CRT) as a conceptual framework and analytical tool. Using CRT identifies the centrality of racism in shaping the slow pace of transformation in general and concerning the institutional culture at HWUs in particular. The paper concludes by reflecting on the implications of this lack of transformation, particularly in a time where poverty is endemic and unemployment rampant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The roles of prominent anti-apartheid fighters, trade unionists, journalists, religious leaders, writers – fictional and non-fictional – and artists have been important in the documentation of the public intellectual culture in South Africa. These are sets of people whose efforts and influences enhanced the achievement of a democratic South Africa. However, since the official end of apartheid in 1994, most South African critics have been those in academics. Artists, especially playwrights, have not received as much attention as they should. Also, when playwrights are studied, attention is mostly directed towards anti-apartheid playwrights, and most of these studies are not focused on positioning them within the conceptual framework of the public intellectual. As a way of studying the effectiveness and ultimate worth of the transitional playwright, this paper seeks to engage in a qualitative interrogation of the works of South African playwright and cultural critic, Mike Van Graan by exploring his status as a public intellectual in the era after apartheid. To achieve this, the paper examines one of Van Graan's plays, Some Mothers' Sons (2005), and one online essay published in 2020 and shared on his social media pages: Facebook, and Twitter. The extension of this study to social media platforms will enable this paper to adopt a study of Van Graan's literary and non-literary works and the reactions they have gathered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars studying race and racial classification in post-apartheid South Africa have paid little attention to how African refugees navigate the South African racial classification scheme and how they self-identity in the face of their everyday encounters with imposed racial classification in South Africa. This paper addresses this research gap by exploring how first-generation Eritrean refugees self-identify in the context of an imposed South African racial classification system. The result reported here forms part of a broader research study that explored how Eritrean refugees in South Africa self-defined in the face of racialization. The broader study identified various themes but this paper only reports on those who defined their race as Habesha in the face of their experiences with racial classification. I argue that by defining their race as Habesha, participants re-defined race as a pan-ethnic identity dissociating racial identity from physical appearance and skin colour. Some refugees who never self-identified in terms of phenotype-based racial categories are nuancing traditional definitions of racial identity in post-apartheid South Africa. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

The New African poet, playwright, and intellectual H.I.E. Dhlomo is often cited as one of twentieth-century South Africa's most important cultural figures. In contrast to his celebrated theoretical writings, however, Dhlomo's actual literary work tends to receive mixed reviews from scholars. This paper seeks to reassess Dhlomo's much-maligned use of Romantic and Gothic tropes by focusing on two of his lesser-known plays: Men and Women and The Expert. These plays, which date from towards the end of Dhlomo's playwriting career, have never been published, yet reveal a great deal about both the nature of his literary project and the conditions of Black cultural production in segregation-era South Africa. Indeed, I argue that these plays engage in some of the most radical social critiques found anywhere in pre-apartheid South African drama, and, furthermore that the melodramatic and incongruous elements of these works are essential to their intended impact. Having experienced segregation-era South African society as an unfolding nightmare, for H.I.E. Dhlomo laughter and horror were intimately related. Ultimately, I contend that Dhlomo's linkage of laughter to the supernatural and the Gothic marks an important moment in South African history, illustrating powerfully the dashed hopes and aspirations of the New African generation within the context of tightening white philanthropic control. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how the South African government and mining corporations have appropriated anti-apartheid and anti-colonial discourses to legitimise Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) as a radically transformative policy without being transformative in conception, discourse, or action. There is a presumption in academic circles that BEE is a panacea for radically transforming historical, structural, and unequal power relations in South Africa. This article rejects this presumption by demonstrating how the conception and discourse of BEE have ignored these power relations and their underlying political economic structures of apartheid capitalism even before the policy was implemented or enforced by the government. Using [Young, Marion. 1990. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Oxford: Oxford University Press] critique of the distributive paradigm of justice, and employing [Fairclough, Norman. 1992. Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press] three-dimensional model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), this article argues that the government and mining corporations present BEE as a new measure of radical transformation while simultaneously reducing this transformation to the micro concept of economic participation, focusing on numbers, representation, and targets rather than on historical, structural, and unequal power relations. As a result, the government and these corporations have reinforced and maintained these power relations while employing the discourse of BEE to masquerade as advancing their transformation. The crux is that BEE encourages Black people to operate within economically and institutionally oppressive structures which amplify the conditions they purport to be challenging. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What do cinema houses have to tell us about the experience of collective leisure in early twentieth-century South Africa? This article considers how the cinema house points to unprecedented social conditions that allowed the emergence of new publics. Drawing on scholarship on the development of cinema in South Africa, the article considers how the historical transformations through which the cinema has passed since the 1910s suggest attempts to domesticate the space of projection of the cinema as well as the formation of new cinema audiences. Diverging from readings of the cinema in South Africa that focus on film, the article considers how the cinema house is inscribed in this scholarship as an evocative cipher of incipient publics and as a metaphor for the containment of a new public sphere during the periods of segregation and Apartheid. While today the cinema house no longer occupies the place it once did, the paper concludes with a reflection on recent recreations of the space of the cinema in two South African art installations. The restaging of these cinemas offers a way into the making of a collective space and the kinds of distinct publics they forged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Developmental State' aims for rapid economic development through states’ interventive policies. These states have two characteristics; they have effective and efficient bureaucracies; they have so-called 'pilot agency' with 'embedded autonomy', coordinating between stakeholders and making policies. South African government aims to establish a developmental state in its policy paper, National Development Plan, published in 2013. This article asks the following question: What is the South African obstacle to establishing a Developmental State? Existing literature points out that South Africa lacks a pilot agency. However, they do not analyse the country’s bureaucratic capacity. This paper traces the process of civil service reform in South Africa after Apartheid and evaluates the outcomes. It contributes to fulfilling the vacuum of existing literature. The government has permitted political appointments to redress the inter-race relations after Apartheid. However, it would have possibly weakened the bureaucratic capacity. Simultaneously, the government has also introduced audits and monitoring systems to calm the harmful effects of political appointment. As a result, the institutional capacity of the country has gradually developed. The 'State Capture' scandal under the Zuma administration, however, paralysed these systems. The Ramaphosa administration tries to unveil the 'State Capture' and rehabilitate the state apparatus’s capacity. Now, the political appointment of bureaucrats in South Africa faces a critical juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper traces the evolution and periodization of shifting ideas about the critical issues shaping city planning in South Africa, looking both at the relative and variable importance ascribed to health and other factors such as labour, economic reconstruction and housing. While the evolution of the South African city cannot be read without an understanding of the role of public health, changing ideas about cities and public health necessitate careful historical unravelling before any causal relationships can be identified. Any urban reconstruction, including post-COVID-19 reform, will demand deep knowledge of how the health/planning nexus has evolved, alongside expert advice on how to maximize urban health. [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]

Although racial classification in South Africa has been extensively studied by scholars, little is known about the extent to which post‐apartheid refugees or immigrants reject the South African racial classification system. In particular, there is scant research on Eritrean refugees' self‐identification patterns within the racially structured South African host society. The current study addresses this lacuna by exploring how first‐generation Eritrean refugees and asylum seekers, who originate from an ethno‐linguistically structured social system, self‐identify. Semi‐structured interviews with 46 participants were conducted. Largely, those who lived in isolated Eritrean ethnic communities rejected identifying by race and instead self‐classified by identities they were familiar with in their home country. The results reported here form only part of a larger study that identified various themes. Four themes were identified in relation to this paper's specific research question: (1) identifying as human; (2) identifying as Eritrean; (3) identifying as Habesha; and (4) identifying as Tigrinya. The paper argues that non‐acculturated and residentially and ethnically isolated individual refugees in South Africa eschew South Africa's racial classification system. The resistance to racialization by new refugees might hold potential for transforming the country's entrenched racial classification system based on Black, White, Coloured, and Indian categories as the social demographics of South Africa change in response to immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]