Unregulated Gambling in South African Townships: A Policy Conundrum?

This study was designed to explore the nature of informal or illegal gambling in South African townships, to investigate what motivates people to participate in this form of gambling and what they perceive are the associated benefits and dis-benefits. A series of focus group workshops was conducted with two groups of gamblers, all of whom had experience of some form of township gambling: one group currently lived in townships and the other had previously resided in townships. Gambling for the township residents was a far more frequent activity than for non-township residents and consumed substantially more of their time. The majority of the township residents classified themselves as unemployed, while of those who were unemployed, most people indicated that gambling was a major source of their income; some even described it as their only source of income. The most significant difference between what township and non-township residents expressed as wanting and getting from gambling was that the former indicated quite clearly and unanimously that what they sought and gained from gambling was money. Township residents were far more likely to indicate that they used gambling to balance their budgets than ex-township residents who gambled primarily at casinos. A lottery type game called “Fahfee” is the most widely spread and pervasive form of gambling and was unanimously portrayed as a necessary and beneficial form of support for the poor and unemployed. Lottery and Casino gambling were, in contrast, widely perceived by the township participants as being ‘rigged’ and unfair. Township Dice and cards were perceived as being ‘fairer’ and as allowing punters to be more in control than casino gambling. The downside of township gambling was reported to be high levels of violence, crime and insecurity surrounding, in particular, the game of Dice. There was widespread inability to calculate expected payoffs or odds, and an apparent belief that these were not particularly helpful skills for gamblers. In Fahfee, the reliance on dreams to guide choice of numbers appears to eradicate any interest in the odds, or of playing strategically. The findings of this study are preliminary but have serious policy implications for education and for gambling regulation in South Africa.     

African ape social structure: Is there strength in weak ties?

Prominent hypotheses on the structure of African ape social organization are examined from a network perspective. Data on chimpanzee and gorilla social ties are summarized and assessed with respect to the hypotheses. Contrary to most of the literature on African apes, a network analysis of social ties reveals that chimpanzees and gorillas have similar structural arrangements in their respective patterns of social organization. Granovetter's weak tie mode of integration of a population at the macro level is used to explain the data.     

‘Africanisation’, African identities and emancipation in contemporary South Africa

This article problematises the concept of ‘Africanisation’ as a response to colonial conquest and apartheid rule, bearing both political and knowledge consequences. It aims to rescue ‘Africanisation’ from essentialist notions, but at the same time to show how paradigms cannot be simply applied where they derive from quite different experiences. The article introduces modes of differentiating concepts that are dynamic, as opposed to static, singular and unmediated meanings that bedevil any emancipatory project. The tendency to see a moment in the life of a concept as having a settled and finalised meaning renders the qualities of democracy, and other similar liberating concepts, as settled though their meaning is never finally realised. While colonialism marginalised and devalued local knowledges, the national liberation project sought unity/homogenisation, which tended to deny distinct identities, as is largely the case today. There remains hostility to pluralism at a social and political level and a failure to recognise autonomous identities unconnected to the state or the ruling organisation, the African National Congress (ANC). The tendency towards static notions of custom and paradigms that do not derive from the experiences of African women, in particular, has tended to erase the voices of women or prejudice the emancipation of women from patriarchal oppression. Africanisation, the article proposes, must be located through an ongoing dialogue between dynamic local knowledges and a range of other explanatory tools.     

Rethinking the ‘race‐class debate’ in South African historiography

This article argues that revisionist historiography has constituted a debate with its liberal opponents which has an ‘either‐or’ form: either class or race has analytic primacy, and either segregation/apartheid is functional or dysfunctional to capitalist growth. This has led revisionists into reductionism and factionalism, despite frequent disclaimers to the contrary. Failure to conceptualise and address the relative independence of social factors has, as a corollary, a functionalist rendition of their relationship to capitalist interests and development. By way of illustration an article by Wolpe and a book by Saul and Gelb are criticised for analytical shortcomings. Finally revised conceptualisations of the relationships between race and class and between capitalist development and racial policies are proposed.     

Black Gotham: African Americans in New York City, 1900–2000

For almost four centuries, African Americans in New York City have engaged in ethnic “dream-work,” shaping the city and being shaped by the city in return. The longstanding practice of racism forced a heterogeneous community of Blacks—originating in different parts of the country and the world, speaking many languages, and comprised of different economic classes— to coalesce as a community in order to challenge their subjugation. This article explores the issues, conditions, and experiences that frame the coalescence of the African American community in New York City during the twentieth century, highlighting how racial identities have been produced in the city. In the first part of this article, I reflect on the presence of Blacks in New York City to illuminate some of the common themes that have emerged from the African American experience in Gotham. The second section is a historical exploration of the black experience in New York City, illuminating the conditions, expectations, events, and spaces that have shaped its formation.

     

Civil Society in ‘Politics’ and ‘Development’ in African Hybrid Regimes: The Kenyan Case

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Civil society in Gramscian conception is an arena of hegemonic contestations and therefore essentially political....     

African American Women and Power Politics in New York City, 1944–1972

ABSTRACT

Between 1944 and 1972, African American women from New York City ran for all levels of elected office, from City Council to the United States Presidency. In this article, I argue that World War II created unprecedented opportunities for women to enter politics. A study of postwar New York offers an excellent opportunity to examine how black women defied conventions of gender and race, challenging the pervasive image of the urban political operative, to advance in the city's tough electoral arena. They succeeded in overcoming the Democratic Party machine, Tammany Hall's, resistance to running black women. Once inside the system, despite significant obstacles, these women pushed to change the Democratic Party in important ways for women and for African Americans.     

Florence Hall's ‘Memoirs’: Finding African Women in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive.     

What Explains the Increasing Trend in African Emigration to the U.S.?

In this study, data from the U.S. State Department on visas issued abroad and information from other sources are used to examine trends in African emigration to the U.S. The results suggest that, on average, moderate increases in African Gross Domestic Product between 1992 and 2007 had a buffering effect on emigration trends. Yet, emigration to the U.S. increased much faster from the poorest than wealthiest countries in Africa. Contrary to expectations, larger emigration increases were found in Africa’s non‐English than English‐speaking countries. Despite the increasing overall trend, however, critical differences were observed in the impacts of specific types of flows. For example, overall trends were driven by increases in Diversity Visa migration, refugee movements, and the migration of immediate relatives. However, significant declines were observed in employment‐related emigration from Africa to the U.S. The results further suggest that impact of trends in African fertility, urbanization, and phone use are circumscribed to specific contexts and types of migration flows. The findings, therefore, provide an empirical basis for concluding that the dynamics of African migration to the U.S. are becoming increasingly more complex.     

"Are You an African?" The Politics of Self-Construction in Status-Based Social Movements

Current debates over identity politics hinge on the question of whether status-based social movements encourage parochialism and self-interest or create possibilities for mutual recognition across lines of difference. Our article explores this question through comparative, ethnographic study of two racially progressive social movements, "pro-black" abolitionism and "conscious" hip hop. We argue that status-based social movements not only enable collective identity, but also the personal identities or selves of their participants. Beliefs about the self create openings and obstacles to mutual recognition and progressive social action. Our analysis centers on the challenges that an influx of progressive, anti-racist whites posed to each movement. We examine first how each movement configured movement participation and racial identity and then how whites crafted strategic narratives of the self to account for their participation in a status-based movement they were not directly implicated in. We conclude with an analysis of the implications of these narratives for a critical politics of recognition. Keywords: identity politics, social movements, race, self, hip hop.     

African ‘recaptives’ under apprenticeship in the British West Indies 1807–1828

Historical attention on African apprenticeship in the British West Indies has been focused traditionally on the period 1834 to 1838. Few scholars have written anything substantial on the earlier apprenticeship scheme which commenced in 1807. This scheme was devised by the British government to deal with those Africans imported into the British colonies in contravention of the British slave trade abolition acts and also abolition treaties signed between Britain and various countries. The Africans, though declared by the British government to be ‘liberated’, were really under a modified form of slavery, as was debatably the case with the later Apprenticeship System.     

Beyond plantations: Indian and African slavery in the Illinois Country, 1720–1780

This article offers an analysis of Indigenous and African slavery in the Illinois Country during the eighteenth century. It shows that slavery did not operate as an institution and was not organized around plantation production, but that human bondage was a set of adaptable practices. Slavery took many forms, and masters had to adapt to that diversity and, in so doing, they forged a single, heterogeneous slave system. Frenchmen brought enslaved workers of African descent to the Illinois Country, and masters worked them on grain farms to sustain an export economy. In this way, Illinois’s economy shared much with the wider Atlantic World. Yet they had to revise their slaving practices in light of the reality that indigenous forms of bondage pre-dated their arrival. In Native North America, slavery operated as a kin-based system of captivity that could structure alliances and sustain local politics between diverse groups. Masters participated in this form of slavery, and incorporated Indigenous slaves into their economies. Rather than stressing the differences that existed between diverse forms of human bondage, this article moves beyond an institutional analysis of slavery to show how slavery’s many guises mutually defined each other across generations.     

Writing dictatorship and misrule in Uganda: Susan N. Kiguli’s The African Saga

This article explores the portrayal of one aspect of the theme of dictatorship and misrule in Susan Nalugwa Kiguli’s first collection of poems, The African Saga, that is, the cruel leadership that is blind to the humanity of the ruled. I argue that Kiguli’s writing of post-independence leadership in Uganda is unique in its use of vivid images that help the reader to visualise how rulers like Idi Amin and Milton Apollo Obote brutalised their compatriots, turning the country into what Henry Kyemba calls, in his memoir of the same title, “a state of blood” and Moses Isegawa, in his novel of the same title, a “snakepit.” Closely reading some of her poems of protest, I demonstrate that Kiguli’s poetry is deeply political in its exploration of both the private domain of the family and the public area of political office.     

Social documentary and personal investigations in contemporary South African photography: Tracey Derrick’s “One in Nine” series

A shell of white gauze floats against a split background in Tracey Derrick’s 2009 photograph, Inhabit – Habergeon – middle English, piece of armour to protect the neck and chest (Inhabit), both autonomous and materially frail. The shadowed wall lifts the calcified gauze towards the viewer, as its lithe body hovers above the vertical divide that separates light from dark. This position apart from the edge may be read as a passage missed or overcome. A year of invasive treatment following her diagnosis of stage two breast cancer in March of 2008 led South African documentary photographer Tracey Derrick to create a photographic series that combines her humanist sensibility with personal reflections on illness. Derrick represents meditations on her trajectory through illness in “One in Nine: My Year as a Statistic,” a collection of reposeful digital colour photographs – including Inhabit – that features the cast Derrick made to obtain accurate measurements for her prosthesis. This body of work complicates a widely held assumption that post-apartheid photography in South Africa focuses more on the individual than collective societal issues. Derrick’s unusual series warrants methodological treatment that attends to the complex ways in which the visual vocabulary and concerns of apartheid-era documentary photography overlap with the personal explorations associated with post-1994 photographic production. In this paper, I utilise socio-historical, psychoanalytic and phenomenological readings of Tracey Derrick’s photograph and “One in Nine” series to elicit an interpretation of the image and series as statement of agency within a metaphorical battle against an invisible, yet pervasive disease. By reading Derrick’s photograph through these theoretical lenses, I reveal her image to be a metaphoric assertion of tenacity and Derrick’s agency, and highlight the areas of overlap between Derrick’s documentary practice and her more personal “One in Nine” project.     

Palimpsest African urbanity: connecting pre‐colonial and post‐apartheid urban narratives in Durban

Durban, a city situated on the east coast of South Africa in the province of KwaZulu‐Natal, has always been marked by layered, imbricative and intricate meanings. Through narrative slices, this paper considers the interwoven relationships between identity and urbanity and presents Durban as a palimpsest space. The paper illustrates the co‐constituting nature of pre‐colonial Durban's form and society, highlighting the manner in which the context of contact left an impression on identity, urbanity and cultural memory. It thereafter suggests that contemporary attempts, through arts and culture, to contour the city in a more inclusive manner, have a long embedded precedent and history.     

After Morogoro: the continuing crisis in the African National Congress (of South Africa) in Zambia, 1969–1971

This article examines the Zambian dimension in the calling and aftermath of the Morogoro Conference of 1969. After the failure of the Wankie and Sipolilo campaigns, Chris Hani and six other members of MK produced a memorandum, which constituted a devastating attack on the ANC’s exile leadership. The authors of the memorandum were expelled and were unable to attend the conference, but their memorandum had a strong influence on its deliberations. The conference recommended their reinstatement, but this did not resolve the crisis in Lusaka, which had ‘tribal’ undertones, and was intensified by Zambian government pressure to remove MK from Lusaka and the country. The reinstatement of Hani and his comrades was followed by protests and defiance by about 30 members of a Transvaal group. Attempts to remove MK members from Lusaka to a bush camp resulted in further defiance and the expulsion of 30 members. There were further crises involving the movement of arms and an ill‐fated attempt by Flag Boshielo and three others to return to South Africa through Botswana. It was not until 1971 that stability was restored, though the position of the ANC in Lusaka remained at a low ebb until the inflow of new recruits following the Soweto Uprising in 1976.     

The making of African‐American Protestantism

Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830. SYLVIA R. FREY and BETTY WOOD. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xiv, 285pp. $37.95 (cloth); $12.95 (paper). ISBN 0–8078–2375–9; 0–8078–4681–3.

A Separate Canaan: The Making of an Afro‐Moravian World in North Carolina, 1763–1840. JON SENSBACH. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. xxiii, 342pp. $45.00. ISBN 0–8078–2394–5.