Piketty comes to South Africa

One of the most valuable features of Capital and Ideology is its concern to take history seriously and consider how the emergence of different political and economic regimes relate to discourses about fairness and justice across time. This paper pushes this agenda further by acknowledging that the experience of a few developed nations should not be taken as the template for the generalized study of inequality dynamics across time and space. In this paper, we interrogate Piketty's analysis and policy proposals against specificities that are central to understanding the production and reproduction of inequalities within South Africa. We reflect on the South African case, the structure of inequality and its changes since 1994. We review a battery of policy interventions that have been implemented to address inequality in the last 25 years. We emphasize that the long shadow cast by centuries of colonialism and various forms of apartheid strongly affirm Piketty's emphasis on understanding history. But this is both affirmation and critique given the foundational, imbedded impact that this specific legacy has had on post‐apartheid society and its policies. Piketty is aware that the levels of inequality in South Africa are so high that this is “unknown territory.” We map out some of this territory to reveal how these extreme initial wealth and racial inequities inform the reproduction of inequalities in all dimensions and undermine well intentioned policies. We claim that understanding extractive histories, imbedded wealth inequalities, and complex social and political institutions allows us to understand and confront some of the reasons why even in light of progressive policies, many of which are in line with the proposals from Piketty, government interventions have thus far failed to reduce inequality.     

Modelling the economics of gaming in South Africa

This paper considers the application of two models for determining the optimal location and characteristics of a casino in a post-apartheid South Africa. The intention in developing the models was to allow provinces a facility for considering how to maximize the return to the stakeholders in the license award process, namely society at large, as represented by the provincial government, and the casino operator. The Allocation Model works on an estimate of total potential gambling spend and how that may be best distributed amongst a number of casinos. The Profitability model takes the estimated gaming spend from the allocation model and assesses the appropriate size and characteristics of the casino best suited to this level of gaming spend. It can then simulate levels of profitability for different proposed sizes and characteristics of proposed casinos. Together these models represent a powerful assessment mechanism for a country considering the introduction or radical changing of gaming legislation.     

The Transformation of Psychology in a Post-Apartheid South Africa: An Overview

Certain issues that are being debated in psychology in a post-apartheid South Africa are discussed, namely the development of professional organizations, indigenous healing and psychology, the psychometric movement, and forms of methodological inquiry. It is argued that South African psychology is striving to become more appropriate to the majority of its peoples, whether it be on the professional or research fronts. There is a desire to develop indigenous epistemologies and not to become excessively reliant on Euro-American epistemological traditions. Psychology is struggling to make mental health resources available to all South Africans.     

Patterns of Giving in South Africa

Abstact This paper reflects on the results of a national quantitative survey on giving in South Africa. It explores the extent and character of giving; who gives, to whom, with what intention? The survey results revealed that South Africa is richly resourced with a diverse and multicultural spectrum of giving behaviors, which are commonplace in everyday life. The spectrum of giving behaviors is so diverse in shape and form that it contradicts many of the basic assumptions of the philanthropic literature, which locate the act of giving primarily in the domain of the wealthy and powerful.     

Growing Fair Trade in South Africa

Fairtrade certification is part of a larger, transnational movement aiming to preserve or create sustainability for workers and the environment. For export-food producers in the global South, it means a fair price, fair labor conditions, direct relationships with buyers, and democracy within their organizations. In democratic South Africa, Fairtrade is linked to government-incentivized Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiatives. The movement is, in effect, certifying and labelling transformative programmes to economically empower members of previously disadvantaged groups. This paper explores the intersection of BEE and Fairtrade in the post-apartheid wine industry. Based on interviews with relevant stakeholders and secondary sources, it shows that the South African context has necessitated some re-negotiation of fairness, and of the role of the international Fairtrade certifier. Although Fairtrade products from South Africa are primarily sold in Europe and North America, NGOs and businesses in the global North have not simply handed down the rules, asking for compliance in return for a label, as might be expected under neoliberal globalization. Rather, the Fairtrade label on South African products means that it was produced according to South African rules that aim to promote social transformation.

La certificación de Comercio Justo hace parte de un mayor movimiento trasnacional que intenta preservar o crear sostenibilidad para trabajadores y el medio ambiente. Para los productores de alimentos para la exportación en el sur global, esto significa un precio justo, condiciones de trabajo justas, relaciones directas con sus compradores y una democracia dentro de sus organizaciones. En la democrática Sudáfrica, el Comercio Justo está ligado a las iniciativas incentivadas por el gobierno al Empoderamiento económico negro (BEE, por sus siglas en inglés). El movimiento es en efecto, la certificación y etiquetación de programas transformativos para empoderar económicamente a miembros de grupos previamente en desventaja. Este artículo explora la intersección del BEE y el Comercio Justo en la industria vitivinícola del post apartheid. En base a entrevistas con las partes interesadas y fuentes secundarias, se demuestra que el contexto sudafricano ha necesitado alguna renegociación justa, y en el rol de certificador internacional de Comercio Justo. Aunque los productos del Comercio Justo de Sudáfrica se venden primariamente en Europa y Norteamérica, las ONG y los negocios en el norte global no han transmitido las reglas, pidiendo cumplimiento a cambio de una etiqueta, como se podría esperar bajo la globalización neoliberal. Por lo contrario, la etiqueta del Comercio Justo en los productos sudafricanos, significa que fue producido de acuerdo a las reglas sudafricanas que intentan promover la transformación social.

公平贸易认证属于一场更大规模的跨国运动的组成部分,该运动旨在维持或创造工人和环境的可持续发展。对于南方国家的出口食品生产商而言,公平贸易认证意味着公平价格、公平劳动条件、与买家的直接联系和组织内部的民主。在民主国家南非,公平贸易与政府鼓励的南非黑人经济振兴政策（BEE）倡议相关。这项倡议实际上通过对变革方案的认证和分类,谋求改变从前处于弱势地位的群体成员的经济地位。本文探讨了在后种族隔离时代的葡萄酒行业中,南非黑人经济振兴政策和公平贸易的交集。根据与有关利益相关者的访谈和二手资料,本文证明了在南非的环境下,公平这一概念和国际公平贸易认证机构的作用有必要进行重新谈判。在新自由主义全球化的背景下,尽管南非的公平贸易产品主要销往欧洲和北美,北方国家的非政府组织和企业却出乎意料地没有简单地制定规则并要求南非遵守,以换取其对南非公平贸易产品的承认。相反,南非产品的公平贸易标签意味着它按照南非制定的规则进行生产,这些规则旨在促进南非的社会转型。

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South Africa: Anti-Apartheid NGOs in Transition

Under apartheid, there were an ever-increasing number of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) concerned about challenging the South African state and furthering a nonracial democratic society. In the 1990s, with the transition to an African National Congress-led democratic government, these organizations underwent profound changes. This article describes the key dynamics of this process, outlines the challenges currently confronting the new NGO sector, and concludes that the prospects for progressive NGO work in dealing with the poor and marginalized are constrained by the prevailing neoliberal economic climate.     

Analysis of HIV Caregivers in South Africa: A South African Depression and Anxiety Group

ABSTRACT

The severity of the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa is well documented. However, little is known regarding the well-being of caregivers of persons with HIV/AIDS in South Africa. This study sought to evaluate characteristics, similarities and differences between groups of HIV caregivers in rural, semi-rural, and urban areas of South Africa. Interesting trends were noticed in the areas of suicidality, alcohol abuse, and intimate trauma. Findings indicate a substantial need for further study in the area of suicidality, denial of or lack of desire to know HIV status and the accompanying diagnostic stigma, and the need for a support network within lay caregivers.     

Child abuse in South Africa: rights and wrongs

In a country in which human rights feature prominently in our discourse about who we are, as well as in the South African constitutional and legal framework, so many wrongs continue to be done to children. One category of wrongs is abuse, but it is not the only one. Poverty, patriarchy and gender violence, as well as the socialised obedience, dependency and silence of women and children, create conditions in which abuse can occur, often with few consequences. South Africa has extremely high rates of both physical and sexual abuse of children. Progressive, rights‐based legislation exists to protect children, but it is not adequately supported or resourced by services to fulfil their provisions. Child abuse and neglect will not be significantly reduced in South Africa, without simultaneous improvements in the social and economic conditions in which very large numbers of children live. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Gandhian fictions: rereading Satyagraha in South Africa

From 1923–24, Mahatma Gandhi wrote his recollections of South Africa from a prison cell in India. This text, Satyagraha in South Africa, was intended to be ‘helpful in our present struggle’ to liberate India, as well as ‘a guide to any regular historian who may arise in the future.’ An emphatically transnational text, Satyagraha in South Africa relies upon the mode of allegory to place South Africa and India in relation to each other. As it encourages comparison, however, it discourages common cause. Gandhi places Africans as the anterior sign in a larger system of signification: South African politics prefigures Indian anti-colonial victory to come, but the African native also represents the innocent natives of India writ large.

Without the political didactics of Hind Swaraj, the journalistic interventions of Indian Opinion or even the philosophical aspirations of My Experiments with Truth, this fictionalised history has rarely been the centre of attention. Satyagraha in South Africa, however, reveals Gandhi’s understanding of imperial geography, as he places South Africa and India in a single frame but fails to imagine them as inhabiting the same historical present. This understanding is reflected in his political decisions, as he fails to connect Indian anti-colonial agitation with struggles elsewhere.     

Financing low-income housing in South Africa: Borrower experiences and perceptions of banks

South Africa is facing a low-income housing crisis, with the current backlog estimated at over three million units. An obstacle in the provision of low-income housing is the difficulty encountered by commercial banks to extend loans in this market despite supporting initiatives by Government. A lack of knowledge on the borrowing behaviour, preferences and experiences of low-income households in accessing housing finance from the commercial banking sector in South Africa hampers an understanding of the reasons for these problems. This paper's contribution is to provide information on the experiences and perceptions of low-income borrowers in the housing market of South Africa, specifically in their dealings with commercial banks. Results from a survey of 653 households across five provinces of the country are provided. In the survey, a structured questionnaire was used to obtain information on the experiences and perceptions of low-income households about their access to credit and housing finance, their experience of banks, the successes in credit approval, their judgements on the suitability of banks’ home-loan products, as well as preferences with regard to prices and interest rates.     

The cost of "doing business" and labour regulation: The case of South Africa

The "Employing Workers" indices compiled from the World Bank's Doing Business (DB) survey for 2006 presented mixed results as to the nature and extent of labour regulation in South Africa. Arguing that these measures – with their narrow focus on legislation – provide only a partial picture, the authors suggest and investigate three possible extensions to the DB framework with the aim of achieving a more realistic representation of labour regulation in practice, namely: "micro-legislation", labour market institutions and judicial interpretation. They conclude with a plea for taking account of the crucial importance of these features in the assessment of labour regulation frameworks.     

Israeli education and the Apartheid in South Africa: ongoing insights

Focusing on education policy and politics in Israel, this essay examines how ethnic segregation is established and sheds light on the latest curricular developments that place a heavy emphasis on Jewish identity. The first part of the paper underscores the rising influence of the radical right in Israel and it’s political theology. The second part presents the Apartheid education in South Africa. In doing so, this part underscores the roles of segregation and religion in establishing a justificatory system that legitimises racial superiority and presents Apartheid education as ‘civilising’ and ‘modernising’. In the third part, the paper discusses how segregation and religious-ethnonationalism make up an apartheid-like reality in Israel, focusing on recent curricular policies. The final part presents concluding thoughts on racism and colonialism.     

Approaches to caring, essential elements for a quality service and cost-effectiveness in South Africa

By 2010 there will be close to two million orphans in South Africa, mainly as a result of HIV/AIDS. This paper assesses different approaches to the care and support of children orphaned by AIDS and other vulnerable children, as well as the cost-effectiveness of each approach. Using a typology of care and essential elements of care, six approaches are evaluated: informal, non-statutory foster care; community-based support; home-based care; unregistered residential care; statutory adoption and fostering; and statutory residential care. A cost-effectiveness analysis assessed actual programs and the costs of providing a minimum standard of care for the six approaches. High costs are associated with formal models of care. Informal approaches may lack the resources to meet children's rights. Resources should be largely allocated to the more cost-effective, informal, community-based structures, but formal models will still be needed for those children who cannot be placed elsewhere.     

The NEET concept in comparative youth research: the Nordic countries and South Africa

The NEET concept has become widely used internationally since its emergence in the UK almost two decades ago. This article reviews the adoption of the concept in two extreme contexts in terms of NEET rates, youth opportunities and youth welfare: the Nordic countries and South Africa. The article discusses the situations of NEET young people in the two contexts, and how the concept is used in the wealthy and relatively homogenous Nordic welfare states and in relatively poorer and racially divided South Africa. While the concept has been problematised in different ways in Nordic youth research, it has been more readily accepted by South African researchers. We argue that, in both contexts, the NEET concept can be taken as an invitation to look beyond individual life situations and biographies, and to focus on how structural forces such as the political economy shape young people’s lives. The NEET concept provides a way of discussing changing opportunity structures and how global social forces such as globalisation and neoliberalisation shape young people’s lives in different contexts. The NEET concept is useful in comparative youth research.     

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.     

Suburban Fear,Media and Gated Communities in Durban,South Africa

ABSTRACT

This article explores the queer writings of Boston-born Edward Perry warren (1860–1928) and the spaces of his Lewes House, East Sussex, that formed the basis of his Uranian ideal. warren, along with his personal secretary (aka lover), John Marshall, amassed an impressive collection of mainly antiquities, most of which helped to form the Boston Museum of Fine Art. At Lewes House warren conceived a community of younger, liked-minded men, many of whom benefited directly from his financial generosity and guidance. For the owner of the house education and intellectual pursuits were the guiding principles behind what was ultimately an ancient-Greek inspired homosocial community. Lewes House was austere and coded as a space for both his much celebrated collection and community, each being an extension of the other. In his three-volume The Defence of Uranian Love (1928), written under the pseudonym of Arthur Lyon Raile, warren falls within a specific literary tradition of queer authors at the end of the nineteenth century who turned back to ancient Greece as a preferred exemplary society in which an older male figure took a younger male under his tutelage and protection, guiding him to his adult life. An important missing component of the Greek ideal that men like warren espoused and wrote about was the space in which this ideal could be performed, worked through, and aestheticized.     

On the ethics of being photographed in research in rural South Africa: views of people with disabilities

Disabled people have long been misrepresented through photography and freak shows. A key challenge in the representation of disabled people is not only how to avoid histories of exclusion and hiding, but also to present the lives of people with disabilities in an empathic rather than an othering manner. We asked disabled people from a rural village in South Africa about the potential negative effects and the benefits of having their photographs taken as part of data collection for a large project. All said that they would like to be photographed, but under conditions in which their dignity was not impugned.     

The public private sphere: family narrative and democracy in Argentina and South Africa

This article explores the paradoxical prominence of seemingly private family stories and memories in the democratic public spheres emerging in the wake of the ‘Dirty War’ in Argentina and apartheid in South Africa. In part because the discourse of the family was used in these cases to both uphold and protest dictatorial regimes, individuals who lost family members to state violence became powerful moral agents in the post‐dictatorship and post‐apartheid periods. Narratives told by and about these individuals – ranging from personal testimony given in each country’s truth commission to representations in theatre, fiction and film – have worked to constitute what may be called a ‘public private sphere’. They not only express personal grief, but also (and especially in wider cultural circulation) have been emplotted and mobilised to construct democratic publics. These may or may not correspond to the nationwide publics envisioned in state discourses of reconciliation. Using genealogical fiction surrounding ‘disappeared children’ in Argentina as a lens to analyse South Africa, this article argues that stories of children attempting to piece together their family histories reveal this dynamic as they become sites for convening democratic publics and critiquing transitional politics.     

The Indian Diaspora in Africa: The Commodification of Hindu Rashtra

A new approach to India’s diaspora has taken place within the wider context of the adoption, in 1991, of a neoliberal economic policy framework. In recent years, Indian private business enterprises have led the way in Africa and this has had an important impact on the state’s conceptualization of the diaspora. New Delhi’s elites actively seek to embrace an objectified ‘globalization’ as a means to benefit powerful externally oriented fractions and the diaspora’s value is measured in its contribution to this project. There has been a determined attempt to commodify the diaspora to serve particular Indian economic interests. However, the current government’s Hindu chauvinism makes the very question of what constitutes a genuine Indian rather narrow. Two factors thus dominate current policy: commodification and categorization. The diaspora in South Africa is discussed as an example where these dynamics can be acutely observed.