Power,poets and the people: Mozambican voices interpreting history

This article analyses the relationship between the state and the nascent African trade unions in South Africa between 1918 and 1948. It shows how the government's attempts to deal with African workers separately from white workers became increasingly difficult during this period. Pressures from African unions themselves, from liberal groups and from the increasingly important role played by Africans in the economy, forced the state to seek a coherent way of handling African trade unions. The paper shows how the state was divided over this issue, with Native Affairs and Labour Department officials conflicting with each other and with government ministers. Although the cabinet held ultimate power within the state, civil servants played a significant role in shaping government policy and determining how it was implemented. The paper concludes that, although circumstances have changed greatly since 1948, the pre‐apartheid era has important lessons for state/organised labour relations in the post‐apartheid South Africa which is currently taking shape.     

The ignorance contract: recollections of apartheid childhoods and the construction of epistemologies of ignorance

Working with the recollections of everyday experiences of apartheid collected by the Apartheid Archives project, and drawing on the emerging theorization of ignorance in the critical philosophy of race, this article explores how an ‘ignorance contract’ – the tacit agreement to entertain ignorance – lies at the heart of a society structured in racial hierarchy. Unlike the conventional theorization of ignorance that regards ignorance as a matter of faulty individual cognition, or a collective absence of yet-to-be-acquired knowledge, ignorance is understood as a social achievement with strategic value. The apartheid narratives illustrate that for ignorance to function as social regulation, subjectivities must be formed that are appropriate performers of ignorance, disciplined in cognition, affect and ethics. Both white and black South Africans produced epistemologies of ignorance, although the terms of the contract were set by white society as the group with the dominant power.     

Jonny Steinberg’s The Number and prison life writing in post‐apartheid South Africa

Under apartheid, the prison autobiography enjoyed a privileged status, with the prison playing the role of the apartheid state in miniature: the penitentiary was one of the most coercive material manifestations of a racist and brutal regime. With the demise of apartheid, however, the prison autobiography has become a marginalised and depoliticised genre. The loss of status of the prison autobiography is paralleled by the endemic neglect of the penitentiary system, despite its important role in South African history. A close reading of the tropes and rhetoric of apartheid‐era prison writing can provide some explanation for the abrupt marginalisation of the penitentiary as a socially important space after 1994: in particular, the line that is drawn between criminal convicts and political prisoners in apartheid‐era prison autobiographies anticipates the neglect of the penitentiary under democracy. One exceptional post‐apartheid reflection on life in prison, Jonny Steinberg’s The Number, stands out both for asking subtle questions about the ideological boundary between the political and the criminal prisoner and for the way it perpetuates the tradition, forged under apartheid, of using the prison as a site for radical social analysis and criticism.     

Examining the undisclosed margins: postcolonial intellectuals and subaltern voices

South African history and culture is etched with traces of subalterns that continue to struggle against silencing. The resistance struggle owed much to the efforts of ordinary South Africans, who bore the brunt of repression. The tactics of the apartheid government included structural repression, state violence and cultural suppression. To the extent that resistance was outlawed and severely punished, the struggle was a subaltern expression. Less well known is the fact that there were other sources of cultural repression: some disaffected beneficiaries of apartheid, who styled themselves as liberal intellectuals were quite reactionary in their responses to the resistance literature. Some relatively progressive intellectuals have also contributed (however unwittingly) to the marginalization of black writers, men and women. The women’s resistance poetry addresses political and gender activism, responses to the deaths in the struggle, the recognition of the need for imaginative strategies to prevail against apartheid, capitalism, patriarchy and neo-colonialism, as well as the need for self-reflection and self-criticism. The post-apartheid period has brought new and tougher challenges. The testimony given by women at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission suggests how women have been silenced by tradition, the brutality of the state and some of their comrades, fear of the consequences of being heard, and by the inherent shortcomings in the structure and process of the investigation. The condition of migrant subalterns in the post-apartheid state is investigated by examining the lives of women who have casual employment as domestic workers and live in makeshift housing in urban shack settlements. Most are sole supporters and caretakers of their households and struggle to make up the curbs in social services that have resulted from structural adjustment. Poorly paid and exploited by their employers, abandoned by the trade union movement and ignored by the local government, the fact that they and their dependents survive is a function of their capacity for labour, networking and creativity. From the methods and achievements of subaltern organizations, it appears that they have a pivotal role to play in improving the lives of subalterns.     

The meanings of citizenship: media use and democracy in South Africa

In 1994, South Africans embarked on a project to create new meanings of citizenship in order to transcend the disenfranchisement and divisions created by apartheid. This article examines the context in which new forms of citizenship are evolving in South Africa and how South African citizens use the media to give meaning to concepts such as “an active public sphere,” “civic agency” and “participatory politics.” The objective of the research is to provide information about the way in which the media contribute to the quality of democracy in South Africa through mediating citizenship in a way that improves prospects for citizens to exert influence over public decisions. As has been the case in other post-authoritarian and postcolonial settings, the continuation of existing unequal relationships to government persists even when new democratic spaces have opened up. This article interrogates the assumption that media are central to citizens’ political and civic engagements in a transitional society marked by persisting inequalities. This interrogation draws on empirical research with citizens to investigate the question that the media are central to constructions of citizenship and participation and engagement with democratic processes. Our research finds that young South Africans interviewed are disengaged from politics and find that the media does not speak to or connect with their everyday lives. They view the state on both national and local levels as not being prepared to listen to their experiences, ideas or conditions of life. While the respondents trust the media as credible institutions, they do not experience the media as being relevant to their lives. The perceived disinterest of the state and the lack of relevance of the media, work together to create a sense of powerlessness and inability to influence policy-making among the young people interviewed. For the media to intervene in this state of affairs, it would have to create more opportunities for young people to participate directly in meaning production through the media, starting by listening more closely to their experiences in order to respond to their concerns in a relevant way.     

NOTES TOWARDS A THEORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC LIMIT

A meaningful discussion about the democratic limit or boundary is only now beginning. Martha Nussbaum's call for a world citizenship in response to the terrorist bombings of 9/11 has animated this conversation in the USA. In South Africa, the political transition from apartheid to democracy keeps running-up against the substance of the ‘people’. In the absence of any ‘traditional’ unifying principles (of language, culture, religion, race and so on), the identity of South Africans is elusive. We might note too that much of the cosmopolitan literature on democracy appeals to a shift in scale, from the territorial state to the world or globe or even planet. One of the key gaps in democratic theory, however, has been its failure to conceptualize such a limit. How can democrats discriminate between citizen and non-citizen without being discriminatory? This is the question that this article seeks to address. It does so by following a major development in the work of Ernesto Laclau – from his collaboration with Chantal Mouffe in their groundbreaking work Hegemony and Socialist Strategy to his most recent book On Populist Reason.     

Life 'Inside the Shell': A Needs Survey of Spinal Cord-injured Wheelchair Users in a Black South African Township

The paper focuses on the experiences of a sample of black spinal cord-injured people living in Soweto. It is argued that their lives are marked by poverty and social isolation. Both are the outcome of environmental and attitudinal barriers. These barriers operate against both disabled people and black people in apartheid South Africa. Therefore black disabled people are doubly discriminated against. Both sets of constraints prevent them from developing their abilities and joining with others to lead socially productive and satisfying lives.     

W. H. Hutt and The economics of the colour bar

Conclusion Long before the international climate of opinion made South Africa’s system of legalized racial discrimination untenable, it was under attack from within. A tiny part of that struggle was waged on moral grounds by decent South Africans both white and nonwhite. The much larger part of the war was waged not on moral grounds but on the economic battlefield where the stakes were profit and losses. As W. H. Hutt so aptly points out, the major disadvantages of apartheid were borne by South Africa’s nonwhite population, but the disadvantage was shared by whites as well. As such it produced widespread tensions leading to resistance, evasion, contravention, and modi-fication of apartheid law. Often evasion and contravention of apartheid law was led by the very people who shared the ideology of white supremacy. The final abolition of apartheid law may indeed reflect a change in heart by South African whites but the coup de grace was, as Hutt put it, the liberating forces “released by what is variously called the ‘free market system,’ the ‘capitalist system,’ or the ‘profit system.’”     

The employment relationship in the domestic workspace in South Africa: beyond the apartheid legacy

Employing more than one million people, domestic service is one of the largest sources of employment for black women in South Africa. In this article, we contend that, historically, the impact of apartheid has been to skew the analysis of employment relationships in domestic workspaces in South Africa so that the power asymmetry and exploitation that so characterise these relationships have been labelled an artefact of the racist apartheid regime and its legislation. By reviewing literature on domestic workers globally and drawing on a study into the impact of the Sectoral Determination for the Domestic Worker Sector, which was promulgated in 2002, we argue for a broader understanding of this relationship: one that takes into consideration its global similarities.     

(Un)settled states: Indian Ocean passages,performative belonging and restless mobility in post‐apartheid South African fiction

A number of post‐apartheid literary works revisit nineteenth‐ to early twentieth‐century Indian Ocean passages. Bringing into visibility South Africa’s other ocean – until recently largely occluded by the conceptual bedazzlement of the black Atlantic – they unsettle some of the paradigms through which it has been imagined. This article explores five such novels, which articulate or critique various citizenship claims through a poetics of (un)settlement. One strand from this cluster employs rhetorical strategies such as an ‘Atlantic register’ to translate oceanic routes into territorial roots, mobility into autochthony; the other registers a more unsettled state as it scrutinises the gendered politics of home‐making and national belonging, and issues a retort to the multicultural imagination.     

Population removal,displacement, and divestment in South Africa∗

In the past twenty years several million Africans have been removed or displaced from the ‘White’ areas to the ‘homelands’. Others have found themselves in the ‘homelands’ by virtue of changed borders between the ‘homelands’ and the rest of South Africa. But all three categories lose on transfer to the ‘homelands’ whatever rights to ‘White’ area residence and employment they might have enjoyed under the pass laws. Transferring people to the ‘homelands’ not only often curtails their access to the labour market; it also adds to the financial burdens of the ‘homeland’ administrations, who find themselves having to provide extra schools, health services, and other facilities. Some of the ‘homelands’ are poorer in terms of public funds than are countries like Lesotho. The financial apartheid that is entailed in the ‘homelands’ policy, which includes classifying public funds supplied to the ‘homeland’ administrations as ‘foreign aid,’ is one of the most insidious forms of racial discrimination in South Africa. Under the stricter enforcement of the pass laws that has come about following the recommendations of the Riekert Commission, people in the ‘homelands’ are having their access to the mainstream economy reduced. Displacing Africans to the ‘homelands’ enables the government to ‘export’ part of South Africa's unemployment problem. One of the chief motives behind the refurbished industrial decentralisation programme announced by the Prime Minister on 31st March 1982 is to promote the policy of influx control. It remains to be seen whether the refurbished programme makes a material contribution to the creation of additional jobs in the ‘homelands’. The action of the authorities in deporting people from Cape Town to the Transkeiin August 1981 under laws governing aliens testifies to continued determination to deflect black urbanisation from the ‘White’ areas to the ‘homelands’. But it is doubtful whether the ‘homelands’ have the space to accommodate people displaced from ‘White’ areas as well as their own natural population increase. Pressures from farmers in the ‘White’ areas for erecting fences between these areas and the ‘homelands’ testifies to growing tensions on the internal borders of South Africa as the ‘homelands’ reach bursting point.     

FIXING FAMILIES THROUGH TELEVISION?

Television has played a central role as a tool through which to imagine and re-imagine the South African nation, family and selfhood, and to ‘fix’ these same categories. From the apartheid state's blacking out of healthy everyday life images of black families, through the efforts of founding a ‘new’ nation using the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, to modern day therapeutic talk shows, television has progressively placed less salience on the ‘nation’ and more on family and interpersonal relationships within this social unit. Self-disclosure on television, especially through a talk show significantly called Relate, ironically reveals and occludes legacies of class and racial differentiations with their attendant socio-economic imbalances. Talking about personal affect to ‘fix’ one's problems on national television emerges as an instrumental undertaking that appears to benefit guests to the show but perhaps not as much as it does the production company and South African Broadcasting Corporation, suggesting that the participants are being exploited. Be that as it may, Relate emerges as an exercise in the interiorization of control, as well as an invitation to undertake serious dialogue about interpersonal intimacy.     

Zebra crossing: walking in two continents sharing and celebrating difference through music

I use the metaphor zebra crossing in my reflective narrative to describe my plight and struggle as a non-white person growing up and working in Johannesburg, South Africa, during the apartheid era. This article considers and compares the notions of culture, diversity and identity as I now work in a tertiary institution in Melbourne, Australia. I reflect on my teaching of African music and position myself as ‘the other’ at zebra crossings, as I create a space in multicultural Australia. By engaging in meaningful dialogue with music and culture, I contend, we do have opportunity to explore, experience and express music making and sharing globally. The inclusion and embracing of non-western music can serve as a dais for understanding and celebrating cultural difference not as distant experiences but as integral aspects of our daily lives.     

"I know a place that is softer than this..."--emerging migrant communities in South Africa

Since the end of apartheid, immigration into South Africa has increased dramatically. Migration has become a volatile issue, with South Africans increasingly xenophobic and threatened by the influx of foreigners.
Simultaneously, the question of national identity has increased in significance, with politicians and academics anxious to capture an understanding of the evolution and complementarity of parallel identities and group loyalties.
In the rush to develop a better understanding of identity formation, the opportunity to examine the impacts of hostility on identity, as in the example of migrant individuals and communities in South Africa, has been over-looked. How migrant identities emerge, and how communities play a role in identities and in the survival of individuals, has been a neglected facet of migration in South Africa.
This article, constructed largely from interviews with migrants, presents a picture of the emergence of migrant communities in South African society and seeks to enrich understanding of the complexities of migrant society within the country.     

Lineaments of the Political Geography of State Formation in Twentieth-Century South Africa

As a step towards framing an understanding of the politics of the South African transition and the prospects for democracy in that country, this paper asks the question: what kind of state is it that is being transformed? It offers the argument that we should conceptualize the history of state formation within the territory that is presently called South Africa in terms of three inter-related trajectories: imperial, national, and urban. By doing this, it is argued, the dimensions of key obstacles in the path of democratic national governance understood as ‘legacies of apartheid’ become clearer as the new leadership of the state strives to establish new forms of rule. Understanding the history of the imperial state system, as well as stressing the distinctiveness of the urban domain, adds to the well-attested story of racial exclusion in the national state and enables a clearer appreciation of matters such as the status of women, the mobilization of ethnic nationalism, problems of crime and civil disorder, and the new forms of politics that are emerging as local ANC notables become agents of the state in black townships and rural areas.     

Begging the questions: producing Shakespeare for post‐apartheid South African schools

This paper examines some of the ways ‘Shakespeare’ is functioning in the post‐apartheid education system. It is not based on education or textbook theory. Rather, it seeks to test some of the assertions of new historicist and cultural materialist theories by analysing the ideological work performed by editions of Macbeth produced for post‐apartheid schools. It asks questions about Shakespeare in the South African school classroom, and about the relationship of work produced in universities to the broader educational, and cultural, context.     

Expanding black subjectivities in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah

Deploying the call-and-response mode as the artistic premise of her fiction, foremost African-American author, Toni Morrison, has persistently called in her criticism for a participatory, intellectual and political, engagement with her position on and concerns around blackness. Morrison’s ideas are being critiqued and expanded to reflect contemporary ‘African’ attitudes and perspectives within the contemporary Afrodiasporic writing of critically acclaimed emergent author, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. In particular, Adichie has, in conversation and in her most recent fiction, suggested that Africans (in the diaspora) articulate themselves differently from African-Americans. Problematized and politicized thus as contested, rather than universally accepted, subjective terrain, blackness more significantly points to the diversity and dynamism of black culture and testifies, in the current socio-political/-historical moment, to recognition of the enduring complexity of black subjectivity. In a close, comparative reading of Morrison’s celebrated novel, Song of Solomon (1977), and Adichie’s popular text, Americanah (2013) – both recipients of the National Book Critics Circle award, this essay offers a fresh, specifically transatlantic and transnational, analysis of Morrison’s African-American views on blackness through the contemporary, Afrodiasporic lens of Adichie. Guided by the dialogic call-and-response mode, and underpinned by cultural, race and diaspora theory, the essay suggests and explores the ways in which Americanah speaks (back) to Morrison’s Song of Solomon, interrogating ontologies of race, particularly blackness, through an ‘Africanness’ that takes cognizance of culturally specific and context-responsive, globalized configurations of female subjectivity in particular. In this way, this essay seeks to expand understandings of, and discussions around, black issues and black life in order not just to resituate the relevance of black cultural ontologies but, through comparative engagement with the ‘politics’ of blackness, to revive in the political consciousness and imagination their crucial significance.     

U.S. firms and black labor in South Africa: Creating a structure for change

Some have argued that U.S. firms should disinvest from South Africa as a means of putting pressure on the South African government to end apartheid. This argument, however, may ignore a dynamic of change in South Africa in which U.S. firms have played and are playing a large role: South African industrial relations have undergone significant evolution since 1979, the year in which major changes were introduced in that country’s labor legislation. Partly a result of these changes, black trade union membership has increased by 800 percent since 1979. By virtue of its unique exposure to varied constituencies, the multinational subsidiary in both home and host countries can be viewed as an agent of sociopolitical change in South Africa. The author wishes to thank Professors Herbert R. Northrup and Richard L. Rowan for helpful discussion.     

Household expenditure patterns and resource pooling: evidence of changes in post-apartheid South Africa

The primary aim of this paper is to examine whether resources accruing to different members of the household and from different sources have differential impacts on household expenditure patterns. The issue is of considerable policy interest for, if the identity of the income recipient does matter in the household’s expenditure decisions, then it indicates the usefulness of targeting income assistance at particular members of the household. The South African evidence is generally supportive of the hypothesis of resource pooling by the income earners in their spending decisions on food, clothing and energy. The results of this paper have been placed in the wider context of social, political and economic developments following the end of apartheid that have caused significant changes in the nature of resource inflow and in the balance of power in decision making within the South African household. The results are indicative of improvements in the standard of living of the majority of South Africans following the end of apartheid.

Foster care in Soweto, South Africa: under assault from a politically hostile environment

Institutionalized discrimination has progressively eroded the formerly cohesive black family structure in South Africa, resulting in an increased need for alternative care for black children, as shown most prominently in South Africa's most populous black urban area. Foster care's inherent problems are compounded not only by apartheid but also by the political unrest in the country. This article offers a profile of Sowetan foster families and the problems they face.