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Restitution has predominantly been described as a legal rather than a social action in international law, as well as in South Africa's history of truth, reconciliation and redress policies after the end of apartheid. Introducing the concept of 'social restitution' this paper argues for a reimagined and wider understanding of restitution to address the need for social justice in the spaces between the law court and individual acts of charity, and between policies for redress and personal antipathy against these. Social restitution can be defined as intentional voluntary actions and attitudes developed through dialogue based on a sense of moral obligation aimed at addressing the damage done to individuals and communities by unjust actions and legacies of the past. Drawing on international debates about and understandings of the meaning of restitution, social restitution is shown to be both continuous with legal restitution and distinguished from it through its voluntary nature, its potential to be forwardlooking rather than punitive, generative rather than accusatory, and offering everyday opportunities to bridge the gap between 'knowing' about injustice and 'acting' to repair it. Following this discussion, the latter part of the paper outlines the need for new categories of actors in contexts of injustice beyond those of victim, perpetrator and bystander (the Hilberg triangle of actors), introducing the ideas of beneficiaries and resisters; argues for the potential social restitution has as a mechanism for rehumanising all actors; and offers recommendations for how engaged action-oriented dialogues might contribute to achieving this aim, while noting the limits and dangers of dialogue. It draws on an empirical study on the meaning and actions of restitution conducted with black and white adult South Africans in making some of its arguments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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While historians of twentieth-century South Africa have made use of women's memoirs as an archive, this article argues that these memoirs can also be regarded as historiography. In Ruth First's 117 Days (1965), Ellen Kuzwayo's Call Me Woman (1985), and Strikes Have Followed Me All My Life: A South African Autobiography by Emma Mashinini (1989), authors critique and reconstitute narratives of the South African past, told through the lives of politically engaged women. They present versions of South African history that not only act as a corrective to the apartheid state-sanctioned narrative of South African history as white supremacist triumph, but also probe the limits of the histories narrated by liberation movements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noting the prominence of anti-fascist rhetoric in contemporary wSouth African politics, the article returns to the varieties of South African anti-fascism inspired by the Italian invasion of Ethiopia in 1935. Opening with a brief survey of South African support for the Italian invasion, three varieties of anti-fascism are analysed: first, white South African anti-fascism, both Prime Minister J. B. M. Hertzog's support of sanctions against Italy in parliament and popular anti-fascism expressed in the white English-speaking press; second, black South African anti-fascism as articulated in newspapers like Bantu World and Umteteli wa Bantu; and, third, the socialist anti-fascism of the Communist Party of South Africa (in Umvikeli-Thebe/The African Defender and Umsebenzi), of Trotskyist groups (in The Spark), and of independent radicals. Two subsequent expressions of anti-fascism conclude the article. The first is the anti-fascism of the white South African soldiers who fought in Ethiopia in 1940–1941; the second, the 1966 speech in Addis Ababa by Jacob Nyaose, the Pan Africanist Congress Secretary for Labour on the national executive, which commemorated the South African soldiers who died liberating Ethiopia from fascism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]