Economic policy in the post‐colony: South Africa between Keynesian remedies and Neoliberal pain

Edward LiPuma is a professor of anthropology at the University of Miami special-izing in the character of globalization and its implications for politics and culture. He is the author of Encompassing Others: The Magic of Modernity in Melane-sia (2000) and the coauthor (with Benjamin Lee) of Financial Derivatives and the Globalization of Riskk (2004) and the forthcoming The Political Culture of Democracy in South Africa (with Thomas Koelble). Thomas Koelble, a political scientist, teaches in the Graduate School of Business at the University of Cape Town and studies economic globalization, democratic theory, and traditional leadership in South Africa. His publications include The Left Unraveled: SocialDemocracy and the New Left Challenge in Britain and West Germany (1991) and The Global Economy and Democracy in South Africa (1998).

SOUTH AFRICA AT TEN: READINGS ON POSTAPARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA Fred Hendricks. Fault-Lines in South African Democracy: Continuing Crises of Inequality and Injustice. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrikainstitutet, 2003. Discussion Paper 22. 32 pp. Notes. Bibliography. Price not reported. Paper. Terry Bell, with Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza. Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth. London: Verso, 2003. 385 pp. Sources. Index. $26.00. Cloth. Sample Terreblanche. A History of Inequality in South Africa 1652-2002. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press, 2002. 527 pp. Appendix. Sources. Index. $43.95. Paper. Allister Sparks. Beyond the Miracle: Inside the New South Africa. Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers/Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 370 pp. Notes. Index. R.169.95/$32.50. Cloth. Hermann Gilliomee. The Afrikaners: Biography of A People. Charlottesville. University Press of Virginia, 2003. 560 pp. Bibliography. Index. $39.95. Paper. After the excitement and euphoria followed South Africa's transition to multiparty and multiracial democracy in the early 1990s, and following the transfer of from the larger-than-life Nelson Mandela to the down-to-earth Thabo Mbeki, the time has come for a sober and realistic assessment of the new South Africa at ten and to look at the other face of the miracle. This review includes a number of authors and works do precisely that. It is not often we come across a work reveals the complexities involved in South Africa's liberal democracy as vividly and concisely as Fred Hendricks's Fault-lines in South African Democracy. Based on a lecture Hendricks gave at the Nordic Africa Institute, the book focuses on two issues: the inequality and injustice inherited from the apartheid regime. His major concern is how historic compromises made during the negotiations for a new South Africa between the African National Congress and the National Party have affected the administration of justice. He argues in spite of the political transition, inequalities between Africans and whites have continued to grow. Racism is so embedded in South African society, he declares, that its reversal requires an all-encompassing state-directed approach (9). According to Hendricks, the emphasis of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) on forgiving wrongdoers in order to legitimize the new state allowed class inequalities to continue. As a result, the new government has been unable to tackle the problem. Furthermore, its land reform efforts have been dismal, with only 1 percent of the land returned to the rightful owners. According to the rhetoric, reconciliation was supposed to develop from the truth; however, when the truth lies hidden under so many crimes for which the senior perpetrators are not prosecuted, it is difficult, Hendricks notes, to achieve lasting peace. He discusses the Committee, in which perpetrators were forgiven if they acted on the orders of a public organization, not for personal gain, and without any knowledge of the victims. Once perpetrators appeared in front of the TRC, they could not be prosecuted in a criminal court. As a result, Amnesty sends a message to future state criminals there is the chance they may be exonerated, especially if they remain in long enough to ensure they are not easily dislodged, or some compromise may be necessary to remove them from power (25). Such an attitude puts democracy in jeopardy. Hendricks concludes as long as the society is structured along a cleavage between poor and rich, the chances for reconciliation are very slim. What Hendricks calls fault-lines become unfinished business to Terry Bell and Dumisa Buhle Ntsebeza. Unfinished Business: South Africa, Apartheid and Truth draws on Ntsebeza's experience as a lawyer who represented apartheid's victims and subsequently participated in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. …

Introduction, Lucia Thesen (University of Cape Town, South Africa) and Ermien van Pletzen (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 1. 'Use your own worlds', Stella Clark 2. Literacies in transition, Bongi Bangeni (University of Cape Town, South Africa) and Rochelle Kapp (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 3. Intertextual analysis: a research tool for uncovering the writer's emerging meanings, Morgan Paxton 4. A body of reading: making 'visible' reading experiences, Ermien van Pletzen (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 5. Change as additive: harnessing students' multimodal semiotic resources, Arlene Archer (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 6. Word, image and authority in the lecture, Lucia Thesen (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 7. Identity, power and discourse: the socio-political self-representations of successful black students at UCT, Gideon Nomdo (University of Cape Town, South Africa) 8. The ESL context: an ethnographic study, Rochelle Kapp (University of Cape Town, South Africa) Bibliography Index.

The embodiment of inequality: AIDS as a social condition and the historical experience in South Africa

This Study Investigates The Connection Between Late Nationalism and democracy, using South Africa as a case in point. I argue that liberal democracy in South Africa accommodated and left unresolved the contradictions of South African capitalism and the African National Congress’s (ANC) multiracial nationalist debate. More specifically, the achievement of equal political rights in the new democracy was premised on the acceptance of unequal economic relations among different classes, genders, and races. Furthermore, the middle-class in all its multiracial and multiethnic diversity is threatened from above and below. Popular demands from below sometimes lead the middle class to partially satisfy the majority’s economic and social demands. Pressures from various economic interests (particularly the business community) limit its room for maneuver. These pressures force the middle class to make compromises that are detrimental to the economic interests of the majority of the population. These realities will continue to inform the ANC and the economic and social policies of future African leaders as they try to transform South Africa. In short, this study seeks to understand South Africa’s multiracial nationalism in the wake of the transition from apartheid to liberal democracy, without a simultaneous transformation of economic relations. This work also examines liberal democracy in contemporary South Africa and the challenges that face this unique experiment.KeywordsLiberal DemocracyAfrican National CongressNational PartySouth African CommunityPetty BourgeoisieThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Journal Article Studying together, living apart: Emerging geographies of school attendance in post-apartheid Cape Town Get access Anthony Lemon, Anthony Lemon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Jane Battersby-Lennard Jane Battersby-Lennard * *Anthony Lemon (tony.lemon@mansfield.ox.ac.uk) is Emeritus Research Fellow in Geography, Oxford University, and Emeritus Fellow, Mansfield College. Jane Battersby-Lennard (jane.battersby.lennard@gmail.com) is Lecturer in Geography, University of Cape Town. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 110, Issue 438, January 2011, Pages 97–120, https://doi.org/10.1093/afraf/adq062 Published: 18 November 2010

Bongani Mayosi: targeting heart diseases of poverty in Africa

South Africa: A Science Lesson

Queering Hip-Hop, Queering the City: Dope Saint Jude’s Transformative Politics

DRUGS, SEX, AND HIV/AIDS IN CONTEMPORARY SOUTH AFRICA Glen S. Elder. Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2003. xiii + 188 pp. Index. $49.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. Jeff Gow and Chris Desmond, eds. Impacts and Interventions: The HIV/AIDS Epidemic and the Children of South Africa. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press / New York: UNICEF, 2002. xiii + 211 pp. $23.95. Paper. Ted Leggett. Rainbow Vice: The Drugs and Sex Industries in the New South Africa. London: Zed Books / Cape Town: David Philip, 2002. x + 206 pp. Index. $19.95. Paper. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, South Africa's transformation from a segregated apartheid state into a multiracial democracy transfixed much of the Western media. Interest has since waned, and when South Africa makes the news today, the focus is often on the government's reluctance address the country's HIV/AIDS crisis. Over the last decade, the democratic state has struggled meet the expectations of its citizens and redress the inequities of apartheid. The apartheid legacy is at the center of Glen Elder's innovative study, in which he seeks rethink what he terms the procreational geography of apartheid and its lingering effects on the contemporary state. Jeff Gow and Chris Desmond draw together recent research on the HIV/AIDS epidemic in South Africa and consider its impact on development. Ted Leggett focuses on the evolution of the drug and sex industries the first multiracial democratic election in 1994. What all the authors share is a call action, demanding that the government actively address the problems facing South Africa's citizens. In Hostels, Sexuality, and the Apartheid Legacy: Malevolent Geographies, Elder applies queer and feminist theory ask how bodies, sex, and erotics played out in South Africa during apartheid and after (xii). Apartheid policies, he argues, were both racist and sexist. He chose hostels as his subject because the officially male accommodations were consciously used by the apartheid state to regulate and reproduce a certain kind of heterosexuality between men and (5-6). The apartheid state, he argues, sought simultaneously destroy the black family-by drawing men wage work in urban centers-and maintain it, by restricting women idealized rural areas, where their bodies became bait in [a] . . . white-constructed, black heterosexual fantasy. . . 'lure' men back rural areas once their contracts had expired (52). Elder focuses on migrants from KwaZulu-Natal, the region historically and currently among the most impoverished in South Africa. Women are at the center of his study because, despite the guarantees of equality in the constitution, they remain among the new state's most marginalized citizens. Elder asserts that hostels were never exclusively male; women had long migrated for short- and long-term visits, often living in adjacent informal settlements and supplementing the family income with beer-brewing. In the late 1980s, as apartheid collapsed and levels of violence increased nationwide, women began formally moving into hostels. Elder cannot answer with certainty how many women lived in South Africa's supposedly all-male hostels, but the thirty women he interviewed at the KwaThema hostel near Johannesburg in 1993 and 1994 suggest that the number was not insubstantial. South Africa's media and its governments have explained the violence that wracked hostels in the late 1980s and into the 1990s in ethnocultural terms, pitting supporters of the African National Congress (ANC) against the Zulu-dominated Inkatha Freedom Party (IFP). Elder offers a different explanation, positing that the violence was in part gender-based, shaped by male resistance the influx of women into hostels, and by men's desire retain their dominance in a hostel system whose legitimacy was, ironically, protected by the collapsing apartheid state. …

South Africa steps up

Journal Article Prospects for Elite-Driven Democracy in South Africa Get access Jeffrey Herbst Jeffrey Herbst JEFFREY HERBST is associate professor of politics and international relations at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School. He has also been a Fulbright Visiting Professor at the University of Cape Town and at the University of the Western Cape and is the author of State Politics in Zimbabwe and The Politics of Reform in Ghana. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Political Science Quarterly, Volume 112, Issue 4, Winter 1997, Pages 595–615, https://doi.org/10.2307/2657693 Published: 15 December 1997

Democratic government in South Africa is less than a decade old. After the bitter struggle to overthrow the apartheid regime, the euphoria that greeted Nelson Mandela in 1994 as the first democratically elected president and leader of the African National Congress (ANC) was justifiably celebrated both at home and overseas. But following the accession of his successor, Thabo Mbeki, in 1999, the spirit of reconciliation is gradually being replaced by a sense of ‘hard realism’, in which political leaders are expected to deliver jobs and services to the poor majority. This article examines attempts to strengthen democracy in South Africa since 1994 and, in particular, considers the importance of the new local government structures. Evidence from the municipality of Makana in Eastern Cape province sheds light on grassroots feelings about the democratic process and raises issues which could have much broader implications for the survival of the ANC government.

In recent years, there have been numerous tragic incidents resulting from the special vulnerability of migrants in Africa and Europe. In South Africa, threats against foreign nationals have been precipitated by the myth that their presence contributes to high unemployment levels in the country. This development has led many observers to turn their attention to the state of democracy in Africa. The present article examines the underlying causes of both the recent xenophobic attacks on foreign nationals and the removal of the Rhodes statue at the University of Cape Town. First, the felling of the Rhodes statue is analysed. Thereafter, the problem of xenophobic attacks by black South Africans on foreign nationals in townships is examined. The article argues that xenophobia and the removal of the Rhodes statue are both forms of protest against political oppression and economic exploitation in South Africa. Lastly, the article proposes an African-Christian model of political praxis that re-affirms the Christian mandate to make positive contributions to the creation of a life-giving democracy in South Africa.

Social media's transformation into public spheres has influenced activism and shifted protests and social movements into digital spaces. The #FeesMustFall movement (2015) campaigned for free education in South Africa. #FMF was precipitated by the #RhodesMustFall movement (2015) which called for the removal of the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town, which represented colonialism. #RMF called for the decolonisation of education and #FMF reiterated the same. In parallel, the #Jallikattu protests (2017) in Tamil Nadu was against the Supreme Court's ban of 'Jallikattu’ a 2000-year-old cultural sport with bulls. The protests were triggered by the cumulative grievances of the people of Tamil Nadu against India's union government. The temporal proximity, student-led activism, social media influence of the protests and the nations being post-colonial democracies invoked the interest for this inter-continental comparison of protest cultures. This study explores a unique comparison of democracies via protest movements in South Africa and India. The researcher has collected data from blogs, e-newspapers, e-magazines, online news aggregators, e-editions of mainstream media, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and personal interviews to compare the discourses, which emerged from both these social campaigns. A snowball sampling method and open-ended interviews were used to collect data from student protestors, university faculty, media persons and the general citizenry. Foucault's discourse analysis and Yin's explorative case study analysis were used to analyse the collected data. Gidden's structuration theory provided a theoretical lens to how colourism, police brutality, racism, casteism, sexism, centres of protests, media bias, and diaspora support affected the social movements. Baudrillard’s simulacra and simulation theory afforded further analysis of the levels of democracies in both these nations. Drawing from the above events and narratives the researcher posits a simulation of democracy in South Africa and India disrupting normative ideals.