Apartheid Regime Research Articles

Идеолого-образовательная логистика в определении успешности современной государственно-образовательной политики, реализуемой в ЮАР

We pay attention to the study of educational system development of the Republic of South Africa (RSA) during the apartheid regime and after its fall. According to peculiarities inherent in RSA at the present stage of state formation, we identify education as a fundamental element in strengthening RSA positions in the international arena. We note the high activity of the current government in solving the educational issues faced by RSA citizens after the fall of the apartheid regime. We considered the legal basis for the formation of a modern educational vector system which implements in RSA. We also consider state educational policy of RSA in comparatively-international aspect with the use of our calculation tools based on ideological educational logistics. The novelty of the research work is that we conducted a study to determine the level of educational potential of RSA in the international aspect by using qualimetric model, which is based on ideological educational logistics. We examine the historical and legislative bases which reveal the essence of the current state policy in the education and science fields of the RSA. We consider the features of democratic elements, required for the formation of unified national educational trajectory regardless of gender and race. We reveal the democratic approaches in the education system. Democratic values embedded in the educational system allowed all citizens to receive affordable qualitative education. The results of research activities can be used in the works of pedagogical, foreign policy and comparative prognostic activities, as well as in works that require determining the success of the state educational policy in the international aspect.

Reading The Diary of Anne Frank on Robben Island: On the Role of Holocaust Memory in Ahmed Kathrada’s Struggle Against Apartheid

Reading The Diary of Anne Frank on Robben Island: On the Role of Holocaust Memory in Ahmed Kathrada’s Struggle Against Apartheid Roni Mikel Arieli (bio) Introduction On the morning of October 15, 1989, Ahmed Mohamad Kathrada was released from Pollsmoor Maximum Security Prison near Cape Town, South Africa. A South-African Indian veteran of the anti-apartheid struggle, Treason Trialist,1 and long-serving political prisoner, Kathrada had spent twenty-six years and three months in prison, eighteen years of which were on Robben Island. Leaving his prison cell, Kathrada carried with him some cardboard boxes containing his most prized possessions: a copy of The Oxford Book of English Verse, The Complete Works of William Shakespeare, nine hundred carbon copies of letters he had written, and an equivalent number of letters he had received. There were also seven notebooks in which Kathrada had secretly recorded inspiring passages he had encountered over the years.2 In his third notebook, Kathrada recorded thirteen entries from The Diary of Anne Frank, which was smuggled onto Robben Island in the late 1960s.3 What drove political prisoners of the racist apartheid regime to engage with a text written by a young Jewish girl in hiding from the Nazis? What stands behind Kathrada’s selection of entries from the Diary, and what makes his reading of Frank’s text so different from popular readings of the Diary in the post-war years? Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl was first issued in Dutch in 1947 and was translated into English in 1950. It was published in the United States and Great Britain in 1952, soon becoming a bestseller.4 When the Diary was smuggled onto Robben Island, Anne Frank was already considered the best-known victim of the Holocaust, due mainly to the dramatic adaptations of her text on Broadway and on film, in 1955 and 1959 respectively.5 However, as Sidra Ezrahi argues, while the adaptation of Frank’s text “brought the Holocaust to the forefront of mass consciousness, [it] did not really seek to dispel the curiously functional ‘amnesia’ toward the events themselves.”6 [End Page 175] As I explain elsewhere,7 this “amnesia” had to do with the consolidation of a homogenous American identity during the 1950s and 1960s. In the shadow of the Cold War, adaptations of the Diary conformed to constructs of universalized suffering, made palatable to an American audience by adopting a middle-of-the-road approach, as well as delivering a combined message on the virtues of American democracy. Universalism was the principal vehicle of this ideological agenda; in the adaption process, some of Anne Frank’s musings about Jewish suffering were omitted altogether, while others were transformed into declarations about the universal nature of suffering.8 The adapted versions were not circulated on Robben Island, yet the Diary in its original form served as an important source of inspiration for the prisoners. Shirli Gilbert’s in-depth article on Anne Frank in South Africa (2012) describes the significance of Frank’s text for some of the most prominent political prisoners imprisoned on Robben Island.9 Gilbert argues, however, that it was only after their release from prison, during the transition to democracy, that the former political prisoners who read the Diary on Robben Island incorporated the book into what she refers to as “Consensual Memory in the New South Africa,” situating Frank as a universal victim of discrimination.10 In 1994, the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam, in collaboration with the South African Jewish Board of Deputies and the Netherlands Royal Embassy in Pretoria, presented a traveling exhibition entitled “Anne Frank in the World: 1929–1945” in several South African cities. Given the national itinerary of the exhibition and its symbolic importance, the former political prisoners/newly minted national figureheads were among the key speakers at the various events launching the exhibition. 11 The first to testify to the Diary’s unique influence on political prisoners was Govan Mbeki, one of the nine activists sentenced to life imprisonment by the apartheid regime during the Rivonia Trial in 1964. Speaking shortly after the transition to democracy in South Africa, at the grand opening of the...

From brotherhood to xenophobia: South Africa-Nigeria relations in the aftermath of apartheid, implications for socio-economic development of Africa

From 1949 to 1994, the white-dominated government of South Africa enunciated range of legislations to institutionalize apartheid, which severely repressed socio-economic status of blacks. Any resistance resulted to death, torture and detention. During this period, Nigeria was the frontline nation that championed agitation against apartheid in South Africa. This manifested in form of policies, donations, lobbies and boycotts. Sadly, however, Nigerian nationals living in South Africa are, today, suffering nearly the same fate South Africans suffered during apartheid regime. Since 1995 till date, bloodletting xenophobic attacks on Nigerians has become a reoccurring norm for South Africans-hundreds have been killed and properties worth millions of Naira looted or destroyed. Given the numerous sacrifices Nigeria made in the quest for South Africa’s emancipation from apartheid and the unique positions of the two countries in Africa, this continued uprising comes with tons of negative implications for not just the duo but the entire continent. It is against this backdrop that this paper tries to find out the relationship between xenophobic attack and socio-economic development of Africa. It shed a spotlight on the history and modus operandi of apartheid regime in South Africa and Nigeria’s contributions towards its elimination. It further gave an account of the incessant xenophobic attacks on Nigerian nationals living in South Africa and marshaled out its implications to socio-economic development of Africa. In effect, it made various recommendations on how the menace could be contained. It concluded that the attack if not checked might crumble the quest for African development owing to the key role being played by the two countries.

Roots of Revolution: The African National Congress and Gay Liberation in South Africa

South Africa’s post-apartheid constitutions were the first in the world to contain an explicit prohibition of discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation, and that prohibition established the foundation for marriage equality and broad judicial and legislative protection of gay rights in South Africa. The source of this gay rights clause in the South African Constitution can be found in the African National Congress’s decision to include such a clause in the ANC’s A Bill of Rights for a New South Africa, published when the apartheid government of South Africa was still in power. This article traces the story of that decision, and demonstrates that the gay rights clause was included in the ANC’s draft Bill of Rights as a direct result of the ANC’s Women’s Section’s demand that the ANC confront and address a broader problem: the oppression of women. First, the article lays out the context, explaining the origins of the ANC’s Constitutional Committee, its work in presenting alternative models for a future constitutional order, and its success in securing the ANC’s commitment to true multi-party democracy and an enforceable bill of rights. The article then shows that leaders of the ANC’s Women’s Section, dissatisfied with the ANC’s constitutional proposals as they stood, sparked a thorough-going examination of the problem of sexism and women’s oppression. This examination prompted the ANC to recognize the fundamental human right of gay men and lesbians to be who they are, and led the ANC to prohibit discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in its draft Bill of Rights.

Dancing for the Nation: Ballet Diplomacy and Transnational Politics in Post-Apartheid South Africa

This article argues that nationalism and international diplomacy are embodied practices, as evidenced through the movement of international ballet dancers in South Africa. Under the apartheid regime, South African professional ballet received generous support from governmental sources. Since the transition to democracy, professional ballet companies have utilized creative strategies to court new sources of support including that of the ruling African National Congress. A key move in this campaign has been “ballet diplomacy” with Cuba—the transnational circulation of dancers, teachers, techniques, and performances in the name of the nation. Professional ballet's buy-in into South African nationalism locates dancers’ bodies in the maintenance and dissemination of state politics.

JAZZ IN SERVICE OF THE STRUGGLE

This article contributes to the substantial body of publications on South African jazz with information on jazz performance and performers in New Brighton, a township adjacent to Port Elizabeth noted for its vibrant jazz scene and outstanding jazz musicians. The article covers several decades from the heyday of swing bands in the 1940s–50s through the 1960s–70s when New Brighton’s premier jazz combo, the Soul Jazzmen, were at the height of their artistry. The role of swing bands in New Brighton and surrounding communities as the training ground for members of the Soul Jazzmen and other local musicians of note is discussed, as well as how the Soul Jazzmen in turn were tutors for musicians of the next generation who became widely recognized artists, composers and arrangers. This is followed by a focus on the Soul Jazzmen and compositions by its members that protested against the apartheid regime in the 1960s–70s. The article is informed by historic photographs, newspaper clippings and information from oral history interviews that richly document how jazz was performed in service of the anti-apartheid struggle in New Brighton.

Equality of Access to Sanitation in South Africa

Equality, fairness and justice are values embedded in almost all the policies developed since 1994 and this is understandable given the inequalities that were institutionalized and entrenched by the apartheid regime. The Reconstruction and Development Programme (RDP) explicitly advanced a social development agenda by setting targets for the provision of water, sanitation and electricity. The specific sectoral policies on water, sanitation and energy went further to contextualize the principles and values that inform the provision of these services in post-apartheid South Africa. So far a lot has been achieved in ensuring equality of access to these services but inequalities persist in terms of regions, race and income. Using SASAS data (2005-2009) this paper examines equality of access to sanitation across 'race' and region. This paper argues that there there is a disjuncture between the free basic sanitation policy and implementation. The contribution of this paper lies in its analysis of access issues in from the dimensions of geography and 'race'. The paper recommends that greater targeting and more innovative strategies are required to ensure that the most vulnerable groups have access to sanitation as it plays an important role in enhancing their quality of life and impact on their contribution on local economic development.

Mutant City: On Partial Transformations in Three Johannesburg Narratives

Abstract Since the fall of the apartheid regime, critical discourse on and popular imaginations of South Africa have focused with renewed intensity on the city of Johannesburg: its schizophrenic social organization, its fragmented geography, its “citadelization,” its “architecture of fear,” and its development within networks of global capital, all indexes of the ultimate failure of the nation to move beyond its segregated past. In this essay, I will focus on representations of Johannesburg's mutancy, a concept that foregrounds its temporal movements rather than its spatial calcification. In particular, I examine the uses to which the tropes of mutation and the figure of the mutant are put in a number of recent Johannesburg narratives. Mutation here is a logic of discontinuous transformation, distinct from “hybridity,” concerned less with mimicry and in-betweenness than with emergent forms of life in spaces where ideological forces have ceded to material ones. The speculative mutations in these texts give body to various forms of emergent, unconceptualized, or fantastic subjectivities, homologous with but not reducible to the “real” mutations taking place in South African urban space. I am ultimately interested in how these subjectivities inform various imaginations of futurity—catastrophic, deconstructive, and regenerative—within a country in which, as Imraan Coovadia has written, “the conditions for transcending the present are hardly to be conceived” (51).

Identity, politics and restriction in Athol Fugard’s art: Writing and liberalism in apartheid South Africa

Athol Fugard enjoys a place of honour in the South African and generally African canon as a great dramatist, creative collaborator, director and as an artist who was able to create a distinctive theatre that blended African and Western forms of performance. His multidimensional (rather than a given perspective) approach to art enabled him to retain his literary leaning and identity. This article examines his often downplayed but equally potent contribution to the struggle against apartheid through theatre. It also discusses his multilayered identity and how it affected his compositions and play-making, as well as the paradoxes associated with even his most political plays. For instance, while he promoted a belief in ‘the personal being inextricably political’, in his plays, in public utterances he denied being political. The article further examines some of the plays’ contested politics through a discussion of the diverse facets of restriction employed by the apartheid regime to gauge and suppress politics in the arts at the time and the underground activities of the playwright and his actor-collaborators who had to contend with the apartheid machinery that was designed – overtly or covertly – to suffocate any form of art deemed subversive and/or anti-apartheid. Generally, the article is anchored in the relation between intention, context and text or performance.

Institutionalising racial segregation in the South African school: the School Board Act, 1905

ABSTRACTThis essay attempts to show how the Social Darwinist thinking of white racial superiority, and so, ultimately, white supremacy, came to be institutionalised in law in South Africa. It looks specifically at the making and institutionalisation of the School Board Act (SBA) of 1905 of the Colony of the Cape of Good Hope. It argues that the SBA contains one of the first constitutive moves that are made in the South Africa that is to emerge with the Act of Union in 1910 with respect to classification, ranking, and ordering in the country’s long history of race-making. It precedes better-known pieces of legislation such as the Population Registration Act of 1950 which the apartheid government institutes almost 50 years later. Through the SBA, “race” as a social fact is entrenched in legal and juridical terms. The essay examines how this process is institutionalised through legal judgements provided by the courts of the Cape Colony.

Co-creating Spaces for Resilience to Flourish

MusicWorks is a non-profit organisation based in Cape Town, South Africa, and offers psycho-social support through music to young people growing up in marginalised communities. In South Africa three hundred years of colonialism paved the way for Apartheid which left a legacy of waste, nepotism, corruption and the oppression of the majority of our country’s citizens. Its impact is still visible today and the consequences of past and current political, social and economic challenges has led to perpetuated patterns of poverty, gangsterism[1], unemployment, and family violence that are endemic to communities such as Lavender Hill where this MusicWorks project is situated. Encouraging and strengthening the resilience of young people within this community can empower them to not only break this cycle but also be part of the solution as they become contributing members of their community and society at large. Ebersöhn’s (2012) generative theory of relationship resourced resilience proposes that when individuals use relationships as a way to access, link, and mobilise resources, an enabling ecology is shaped that can foster positive adjustment in a largely at-risk environment. Drawing on this social-ecological understanding of resilience, this paper outlines the MusicWorks project in Lavender Hill and discusses case vignettes of music work with young people and the broader school community. The aim of the project is to co-create musical spaces where young people and those around them can access resourced relationships.
 
 For the purpose of this paper the use of the term “gangsterism” is located firmly within the South African context, were terminology around “gangs” and “gangsterism” refers to a specific grouping of people who are involved in highly structured gangs whose criminal activity revolve mainly around illicit drug trade, with links to local and international organized crime networks ( Chetty, 2015; Goga, 2014; Shaw and Skywalker, 2016; Goga, 2014; Wegner et al., 2018). Several authors have linked the proliferation of gangs, specifically in Cape Town, to the forced removals of people during 1960 to 1980 as part of the Apartheid government’s Group Areas Act ( Chetty, 2015; Goga, 2014; Kinnes, 2017; Steinberg, 2004).

Conflict, Complicity, and Challenges: Reflections on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission Health Sector Hearing.

This article describes the work of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) in examining the role of the health sector in human rights violations in the protracted conflicts during apartheid. The enabling legislation contained in the Promotion of National Healing and Reconciliation Act of 1995 allowed for in-depth examination of violations and complicity in human rights abuses. We provide an overview of the process of the public hearings, soliciting submissions, examining evidence of abuse, personal testimony of conflict in situations of dual accountability, and ultimately the recommendations made by the TRC. The article also outlines the responses of various health professional training institutions to the TRC's recommendations, the implementation of university health and human rights courses, and some current challenges post-TRC. The health sector hearings of the TRC provided a window into the structural unequal access, racial discrimination, prejudice, and abuse in the health services under the apartheid regime. Examination of past violations perpetrated by an abusive regime and by those such as health workers operating in such a system is imperative to ensure that these abuses are not repeated in the future. In delivering comprehensive, compassionate, and ethical care, healthcare professionals have accountability to respect and promote the human rights of their patients. Training in human rights and its relationship to health should be incorporated into all health professional programs.

Jamie Miller, An African Volk. The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2016

Jamie Miller, An African Volk. The Apartheid Regime and Its Search for Survival. Oxford, Oxford University Press 2016

Indigenous Knowledge, Food Production and Food Security in Rural Khambashe in the Eastern Cape, South Africa

ABSTRACTIn the then Ciskei, the apartheid policy of separate development introduced a decentralised industrialisation system. This strategy promoted the establishment of firms and factories in the Bantustans and Homelands (i.e., reserved black areas outside of the then so-called white South Africa). The strategy was backed up by subsidies from the National Party led- apartheid government, helping to create employment in rural areas. However, with the advent of democracy in 1994, the apartheid government subsidy system was terminated as part of the broader processes of reconstruction and development, as well as redress of the past inequities. This resulted in rapid deindustrialisation and the high unemployment as factories that depended on the government subsidies closed, and jobs were lost. This article is based on research conducted amongst households in the Khambashe village, located in the former Ciskei Bantustan area, and sought to understand how they responded to the challenges of unemployment and poverty due to deindustrialisation. Specifically, the paper seeks to understand the role, if any, of indigenous knowledge in food production and food security. A mixed methods approach comprised unstructured face-to-face interviews, and a survey questionnaire was used to gather data on indigenous knowledge and its role in food production processes and food security. Results were analysed through thematic analysis and SPSS. The findings suggest that women are mostly responsible for using indigenous techniques in food production activities such as planting, hoeing, weeding, harvesting, and food processing and preservation as well as soil conservation. Both men and young people are minimally involved.

Globalised tuberculosis control in local worlds

Despite a steady global decline in the incidence of tuberculosis (TB), progress towards health targets has been slow and a crisis of drug-resistant strains of TB continues unabated. The United Nations high-level meeting on TB in September 2018 resulted in a renewed push to invest in drugs, diagnostics and vaccines to “reach” those most vulnerable to the disease. Yet, an overriding focus on biomedical technologies to manage TB at the expense of meaningful engagement with the social threatens to further consolidate its reputation as a “silent killer.” Drawing on anthropological contributions from South Africa and one from neighbouring Zimbabwe, this special issue explores how human action produces, shapes, names, experiences and resists the disease in its fullest breadth within local conditions. The articles recognise TB as a “global” object of biomedical knowledge and intervention, on the one hand, and as intricately tied to a legacy of colonial and apartheid governance, on the other. Each article deals with different aspects of understanding the interface between global and national policies and their unintended effects in local worlds.

Jamie Miller, An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and its Search for Survival

Jamie Miller, <i>An African Volk: The Apartheid Regime and its Search for Survival</i>

The politics of history textbooks in South African classroom in the era of Curriculum 2005

South Africa has recently celebrated twenty years of political transition from apartheid government to a democratic nation. One of the important changes in this transition was the reform of classroom curriculum, including the nature of textbook content taught in post-apartheid South African schools. This article discusses the textbook content in the era of Curriculum 2005, a national curriculum statement introduced in 1997 and subsequently revised in 2002. First, I discuss the socio-political history of education in South Africa, including the transition from apartheid to post-apartheid as a context to this analysis. Second, I describe the limitations of history textbooks content taught in post-apartheid classrooms. Using critical theory, I argue that the content of newly adopted history textbooks did not radically interrupt the long-standing misrepresentation and underrepresentation of the political histories of marginalized groups in South Africa, although some textbooks have made progress than others. Keywords: History Textbooks. South Africa. Post-Apartheid. Curriculum 2005. Critical Theory.

Saving for Tomorrow: Does the Level of Financial Literacy in the South African Working Class Matter?

Financial literacy has been identified in previous studies as an area that has not been researched extensively in South Africa. This is particularly true for the working class of black South Africans, who have been previously disadvantaged and were excluded from the mainstream economy and financial services under the apartheid regime. Lower savings and over-indebtedness in this group can be attributed to lower levels of financial literacy. The aim of this study is to examine financial literacy of black South Africans with a commerce tertiary qualification working in Pretoria and Johannesburg, based on descriptive research and structured questionnaires. In total, 171 participants who work in different sectors of the economy and who live in Gauteng were surveyed. The study found that although people with a commerce tertiary qualification are more financially literate than those with non-commerce tertiary qualification, black South Africans nevertheless are less financially literate than their coloured, Indian and white counterparts. Additionally, financial literacy is a significant predictor of individuals’ saving habits.

RISE AND FALL OF JACOB ZUMA

In May 2014 I suddenly received a telephone call from the South African Embassy in Moscow, then an official invitation signed by Jacob Zuma followed: he wanted me to be present at his second inauguration. Unfortunately I failed to do it, I was still recovering from a surgical operation, but the very fact was significant, not because I had been involved, but because it symbolized friendly relations that existed between the South African president and those in Russia who took part in supporting the long struggle against the apartheid regime.

Not Just Nelson’s Wife: Winnie Madikizela-Mandela, Violence and Radicalism in South Africa

The late Winnie Madikizela-Mandela was a political figure who excited strong views; these continue in the immediate aftermath of her death. Most analyses of her utilise the binary trope of good/bad mother and wife, and seek either to excoriate or to sanctify her. In this article, I re-examine the key incidents in her ‘fall’ from political grace, when the Mandela United Football Club (MUFC) embarked on a series of violent actions in the mid 1980s. Using a feminist lens, the article argues that Madikizela-Mandela deployed gender as a political resource, but that she went beyond the boundaries set for women in South African liberation politics to become a populist leader in her own right. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela exemplified the radical rejection of political negotiations in South Africa and supported an accelerated and, if necessary, violent confrontation with the apartheid government. The article revisits the 1997 Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) hearing into the activities of the MUFC, exploring Madikizela-Mandela’s testimony as a performance of the refusal of the terms of the democratic transition. Rather than accepting the contingent, messy and sometime compromised arrangements that accompanied the end of apartheid, Madikizela-Mandela articulated a set of radical positions that were in tension with the position of the African National Congress (ANC), a movement of which she was a leading member. Against the dominant position that a political compromise was necessary, she held on to the fundamental argument that only a thoroughgoing overturning of apartheid (not just legal forms but economic and social dimensions) would be acceptable, and that, if necessary, this should be achieved by violence. This radical position remains attractive to important sections of the left, but leaves key questions of politics – in particular the place of revolutionary violence, and the terms on which friends and enemies are identified, unanswered.