Editorial

Abstract

The articles in this general issue display a disciplinary spread fairly typical for this journal – anthropology, development studies, geography, history, literature, politics. We begin, though, with something of a new departure, an assessment of the state of a particular discipline, in this case, archaeology. We plan to carry coverage of this sort on a regular, if intermittent, basis in the future. However, rather than focusing on the findings of research as such, Nick Shepherd looks at archaeology in South Africa as a process of knowledge construction. He probes the social and political context and impact of the discipline at key moments of transformation in the past and explores where archaeology is and could, or should, be located in the present, in relation to science, culture and national identity.Current political and economic concerns drive the next three articles. Sara Rich Dorman throws light on the polarisation of Zimbabwean society in the run-up to the referendum on the constitution in 2000, with many in NGOs, churches and trade unions voicing devastating critiques of the regime's policies. The voting public affirmed the claims made by the National Constitutional Assembly to speak and act outside the remit of the state, while popular rejection of the government set the stage for the violent and coercive politics of 2000 and beyond. Mary Galvin and Adam Habib are likewise concerned with civil society and community empowerment in their analysis of the rural water sector in South Africa. They argue that donor aid has largely tended, through neglect of NGO involvement and local capacity building, to promote state-centric rather than community-oriented decentralisation. The European Union (EU) is one of the main funders examined, and it is South African trading relations with the EU which Richard Gibb analyses in the article that follows. South Africa's reintegration into the world economy via, for example, a vital trade agreement with the EU in 1999, has taken place on profoundly unfair terms, he contends, with the EU promoting fair trade where it could compete and yet being very protectionist about its uncompetitive agricultural sector.Isidore Diala takes us back to the apartheid years in his exploration of ideas of tragedy in the novels of André Brink, while also pointing to the contrasting political line in the writer's work since the democratic transition in South Africa. Despite Brink's seemingly proactive political stance against apartheid, his doomed, tragic (often liberal Afrikaner) political heroes are granted little agency, remaining passive in the face of powerful, implacable metaphysical forces. In post-apartheid society, however, Brink's 1990s work suggests the Afrikaner can invest in social action and hope to help transform the country and rewrite history.Heterosexual masculinity is the focus of the next two articles, albeit in very different eras and settings. Glen Elder challenges accounts of migrant worker hostel violence of the last two decades for over-emphasising ethnicity and failing to employ gender, sex and space sufficiently as analytic categories. A feminist geography alert to patriarchy's links with compulsory heterosexuality can also help interpret the marginalisation of women from contemporary debates about hostel conversion. While Natasha Erlank's historical gaze is rural, not urban, and centred on the eastern Cape, not the Rand, she too is portraying male solidarity, in this case in the face of colonial and missionary disapprobation of customary practices around gender and marriage. Regardless of whether they were Xhosa, Thembu or Mfengu, Christian or unconverted, African men testifying to the 1883 Commission forged, she argues, a certain commonality of approach, perhaps even an embryonic ‘nationalism’, based on the subordination of women.