History Of Apartheid Research Articles

The presence of a ‘nanny’ in South African infant observations: learning opportunities and challenges for student observers and their teachers

ABSTRACTMany South African infants are co-reared by a ‘nanny’ employed as a domestic worker in the family home. The racial distribution of this sector of the labour force is 100% black. Domestic workers seldom have any formal or semi-formal training and they remain undervalued and subordinate in labour status. Given the country’s cruel apartheid history; racial, cultural, socio-economic, labour and power dynamics underpin these domestic relationships. There is a paucity of research into the impact of ‘nannies’ on the infant’s early life and development, or on the relational dynamics that develop between infant, mother and ‘shadow mother’ in the South African context. Privileged learning and qualitative research opportunities are proffered by the high percentage of infant observations situations that include the presence of a nanny. Further, the student observer and indeed the observation situation itself are not immune to the influence and impact of the complex relational dynamics. In a country that is working hard to repair damaged relationships in the aftermath of apartheid, small opportunities for hope emerge in the reflective discussions of the seminar groups. This paper explores several of these themes illustrated by vignettes from infant observations presented to the author over several years.

Neighbourhood deprivation, smoking, and race in South Africa: A cross-sectional analysis

Research on the role of neighbourhood-level deprivation in low- and middle-income countries with respect to tobacco use is relatively nascent. In South Africa, where race and deprivation are closely linked due to the history of apartheid, smoking disparities exist by individual risk factors such as gender, race, and socioeconomic status. However, less is known about how community-level factors affect smoking disparities in the country, or how the relationship between deprivation and smoking differs by race. We used data from the 2008 South African National Income Dynamics Study (NIDS) and Poisson generalised estimating equations to assess the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and current smoking for individuals nested within neighbourhoods, while controlling for individual-level and household-level covariates. Subgroup analyses for racial categories Black and Coloured were performed. We found that the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and smoking prevalence was non-linear: the smoking prevalence ratio was highest among those in the middle range for our deprivation index, and lower at extremely high and low levels of deprivation. Both Black and Coloured subsamples exhibited this inverted U-shape, although the relationship was weaker in the latter group. That the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and smoking is non-linear contrasts with what has been found in high-income countries, where the relationship between neighbourhood deprivation and smoking is linear. Moreover, these findings are relevant to assess the potential differential impact of smoking interventions as a function of socioeconomic and environmental context.

Sarah Haley. No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity.

Sarah Haley’s study of women’s imprisonment in the South represents a significant and exciting development in the history of Jim Crow racial apartheid. The stories of convict-leasing camps, penitentiaries, and chain gangs document how the histories of racial terror and industrial capitalism intertwined in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In the sweep of violence and resistance that it masters, this book is as breathtaking as it is poignant. Haley takes some genre-breaking risks that enhance the analytic reach of No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity. In addition to close readings of poetry and music, there is a section of speculative narrative (fully disclosed in the text) that invites the reader in to ponder a historical possibility through a well-imagined intimacy between two subjects. No Mercy Here is structured chronologically and thematically. Haley starts by examining constructions of black women’s deviance as it was created by southern carceral regimes. She demonstrates how journalists represented various female convicts differently to underscore the femininity of white women, which negated the humanity of black women. The process of “queering” black women prisoners portrayed them as crazy, uncontrollable, and less intelligent than white women. Cultural representations of criminality, Haley shows, became important contrasts for signifying the humanity and femininity of white women, whom judges and parole boards rewarded with pardons and clemency far more often than they did black women. These portrayals and the imagined capacity of black women for hard labor contributed to what Haley describes as their supposed “hyperimprisonability” (77).

THE HERO'S PRE-DISCURSIVE AND DISCURSIVE ETHOS IN NADINE GORDIMER'S MY SON'S STORY

Written in a context of social and political turbulences, My Son Story puts light on the different occurrences that shaped Apartheid history. In her alight elan to unveil nooks and crannies of the gloomy pages of South African elapsed history, Nadine Gordimer goes deep down in her country’s past to pinpoint ins and outs of a daily harassed and strongly subjugated people to the law of the strongest. Thus, this paper explores and analyses the semantic features of the discourse of resistance, grounding our reflection on the quirks of ethos and subjectivity of a heroic stand. To this end, it gouges out the different communicational assets that have raised the personae of a combatant to the sheer ranks of the heroes of freedom in South Africa. Article visualizations:

Music of Politics and Religion Supporting Constitutional Values in South Africa

The Constitution of South Africa has been taken as a model globally as it supports non-discrimination and human rights. The purpose of this study was to analyse the South African National Anthem and a secular political song to investigate how music supported the values enshrined in the Constitution, including religious freedom, during the transition from a history of apartheid towards 25 years of democracy. Politicians such as Nelson Mandela and religious leaders such as Archbishop Desmond Tutu, black African spiritual practitioners, Muslim ecclesiastics, rabbis and others played a prominent role in a peaceful transition to democracy. Although there have been a few violent episodes like service delivery protests, farm murders, xenophobia and the tragedy of Marikana since 1994, in general South Africa has been peaceful, despite its history. This study concluded that the music of politics and liberation can be related to value systems and lack of conflict between ethnic and religious factions in South Africa since 1994.

Introduction: Flint and the Racialized Geography of Indifference

In this introduction to the Critical Sociology symposium, “The Flint Water Crisis and the Failure of Neoliberal Governance,” the authors outline the social and cultural conditions for the racialized underdevelopment of Flint and Detroit in the late 20th and early 21st centuries. We begin with an examination of the racially coded rhetoric of Oakland County manager, L. Brooks Patterson, and the manner in which those racial codes reveal the deep roots of white suburban anxiety and racism in the history of economic and spatial apartheid in Michigan. Turning to Flint itself, we draw upon Andrew Highsmith’s recent history of the city, Demolition Means Progress (2015), and examine 20th century red-lining, school segregation, and neoliberal policy decisions as they interacted, effectively rendering Flint’s African American population invisible and, finally, through emergency management, nearly powerless. We close with a survey of the articles within the symposium. Each contribution to the symposium finds that even within the structural and political limitations imposed by neoliberalism, residents and activists continue to find productive spaces for resistance.

TV is the Devil, the Devil is on TV: Wild Religion and Wild Media in South Africa

In keeping with trends in the academy and the rapidly increasing presence, power, and persuasion of digital and electronic media on the African continent and in the global economy, the study of religion and the media in South Africa has become a flourishing field of intellectual inquiry. The expanse of the field in terms of approaches, both methodological and theoretical, demonstrates the multiple and complex interactions between religion and the media in a diverse range of societies and settings. In light of its recent history of apartheid and transition into democracy in the middle 1990s, when paradigmatic constitutional and political changes took place in which the relationship between religion and the media was reconstituted, the South African context, in particular, is ripe for exploring media technology and practices in relation to the political economy of the sacred. This essay pays tribute to David Chidester by testing the possibilities of his theory of 'wild religion' against two vignettes of wild media in South Africa. The first, characterized as TV is the devil explores the apartheid government's pre-emptive religiously saturated ban on television. The second example, described as the devil is on TV assesses viewers' responses to the television program, Lucifer. I argue that when read with Chidester's theorization of the 'wild ambivalence of the sacred', these examples evoke the hitherto under-explored wild character of both religion and the media.

Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live By

Decolonizing Education and Research by Countering the Myths We Live By Julie Reid (bio) Countermythologization and Collective Action This essay argues for a revision of both research and teaching practice within the fields of media studies and the communication sciences, and adopts Barthean semiotic myth theory as a means to demonstrate how such revision could be envisaged as countermythologization within the current climate of decolonization. First, a brief discussion broadly contextualizes the decolonization debate. This is followed by two examples of how [End Page 132] this overarching environment can be responded to, first, by rethinking media studies research practice, and second, by critically revising traditional teaching practices within media and communication studies. Roland Barthes constructed the semiotic formula for myth to illustrate how myth acts as a mode of (often political) speech, regularly utilized in visual and mediated cultural artifacts such as film and advertising, for the purposeful naturalization and justification of dominant modes of thought and power.1 Mythologization, which is the activity of mythic speech, differs from the concepts of, for example, discourse and/or narrative in that it declines the provision of detail, empties out its subject of history, and presents only a partial, simplified, and uncomplicated view of the world. Although mythic speech neither tolerates nor accommodates contradiction, it can be remarkably effective in persuading a lot of people that the ways things are, are the way they are meant to be. Since Barthes's original theorization of myth as the "top-down" exertion of communicated power by the dominant sections of society, countermyth theory has examined the conscious mythologization of voices of opposition and dissent.2 The contestation of dominant colonially inscribed power and its resultant myths, and the current oppositional movements fronting decolonization, can be understood within this theoretical frame. A key moment in the decolonization movement arose in 2015, when a collective of students at the University of Cape Town in South Africa called for the removal of a statue of the nineteenth-century imperialist Cecil John Rhodes from the university's campus. Demands to remove the statue were metonymic of a desire for the transformation of university curricula and culture, as many black students felt alienated within an institutionalized Eurocentric outlook. The #RhodesMustFall initiative provided impetus for the #FeesMustFall student movement, which blossomed on campuses shortly thereafter, sprouting a series of student-led protests in 2015 and 2016. The students' requests varied depending on the particular conditions at each campus, but in general two demands appeared as the main thrust. The first was the provision of access to quality higher education to all willing scholars, free of charge. The second was for a revision and transformation of university curricula, that is, for the decolonization of education.3 Subsequent to #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall, collective mobilizations have initiated across the globe, emphasizing similar substantive points of critique and foci, such as the 2015 student protests in the United Kingdom and the Netherlands, and the 2017 social movements against Confederate monuments in the United States.4 [End Page 133] Responsive South African academics in tertiary communication and media studies schools are currently engaging in a significant process of overdue curriculum revision. The national conversation, which was initiated by the students and followed by the collaborative efforts of media studies and communication academics, partially facilitated by the South African Communications Association (SACOMM), to confront the necessary task of decolonization, provides a rich platform for debate, contestation, and transformation.5 Narratives of racial division have often directed the trajectory of this conversation about curriculum, which in the South African context is to be expected, given the country's recent apartheid history. Fissures of race differences that germinated during colonialism may have evolved in their form (if not their function), but they nonetheless persist in the present. A gruesome beast, this mythology shifts the balance of opportunity and power in favor of some peoples over others, and it crawls about within the socioeconomic structure of things in South Africa much as it does in many other societies. But an overemphasis on issues of race politics risks ignoring the fact that the project of decolonization is about more than balancing the scales of racial inequality. To be sure, the...

The Life and death of Anene Booysen: Colonial discourse, gender-based violence and media representations

This article makes the argument that representations of gendered and sexual violence, its perniciousness and its persistence need to be traced historically, not just to the recent history of apartheid but to a longer colonial history, which has continued relevance for the ways in which bodies and subjectivities are coded. Media reportage on the death of Anene Booysen in 2013 is read through a decolonial feminist lens to argue that it tells us something of the enduring legacy of coloniality, to illustrate how gendered violence is made meaningful in our collective consciousness, and to show that it demands a rethinking of our framing of gendered violence in the present.

Decolonisation and Teaching Law in Africa with Special Reference to Living Customary Law

The student protests in South African Universities, which started in 2015, demanded the decolonisation of certain aspects of higher education. While the primary demand is free education, issues of the curriculum and transformation connected with the country's history of colonialism and apartheid have also surfaced. In the field of law, demands for curriculum change are accompanied by the broad issue of the decolonisation of law, translating into questions of legal history, the concept of law, the role of law in African societies, the status of indigenous systems of law in the post-independent/apartheid legal system, and how law is taught in law schools. This paper examines the idea of the decolonisation of law in relation to the teaching of law in African states previously under the influence of English or Roman-Dutch colonial/apartheid legal history. The teaching of law is with special reference to the system of law that governs the majority of people in Africa in private law and aspects of governance – living customary law. The paper examines the design of legal education with respect to three elements that are essential to the decolonisation of law and legal education. The elements under review are the inclusion of living customary law in legal education, a shift in the legal theoretical paradigm within which law is taught, and the interdisciplinary study of law. Thus, the paper links the decolonisation of law to how law is taught, with special reference to living customary law. In discussing these elements, the paper draws examples from the South African legal system, because it has the most advanced jurisprudential conceptualisation of customary law on the African Continent.

The Articulation of an African Philosophy of Equality as Legacy of the South African Constitution

African nations have in common the brutal and humiliating experiences of racism, slavery, colonialism, exploitation, and marginalisation. I refer to this collective trauma as the triple humiliation of racism, slavery and colonialism. These shared experiences to a varying degree have informed those nations’ perspectives on equality and non-discrimination in the quest for the recognition of equal humanity. Unlike the rest of the continent, several countries in Southern Africa (ie, Namibia, South Africa, Zimbabwe) achieved black democratic rule towards the end of the twentieth century. Most notably, in 1994 South Africa realised democratisation and adopted an interim constitution. The final Constitution, promulgated in 1996, enshrines equality provisions that express lessons learned from South Africa’s history of racism, colonialism and apartheid – a past defined by institutionalised inequality.The Constitutional Court and other competent courts since 1994 have developed an impressive and coherent philosophy of equality. Although South African equality jurisprudence has echoes in all regions of Africa and beyond the legal sphere, no effort has been made to bring this radiating influence to its ultimate conclusion, namely that the South African Constitution and constitutional law largely articulates a truly African philosophy of equality. I draw just such a conclusion. In reflecting on the successes and shortcomings of the South African Constitution twenty years after its promulgation, I find that the equality jurisprudence is indisputably an enduring legacy, not only in South Africa, but in Africa as well. Earlier studies have not elevated the equality jurisprudence to an African jurisprudence because they did not connect the ideal of equality to the pan-African philosophy of the muntu or ubuntu. If the connection is made, different people in different parts of the continent will not merely be able to appropriate this philosophy; they will actively build on it as a rich, invaluable, living source of meaning, self-identity and self-worth.

“Like photographs of ghosts”: representing post-apartheid South Africa in Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative

The South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) heard its first testimony in April of 1996. Two years later, in 1998, the first volume of the report of the commission was published. While it aims to be a document representing closure in terms of the history of apartheid, the TRC report is rife with gaps and omissions across the long history of apartheid. Approaching this history and its legacy in literary prose, Ivan Vladislavić’s Double Negative (2010) serves as a counter-history to the TRC’s narrative of closure. Extending formal strategies from his earlier works, including composite literary form and performative modes of writing, Vladislavić employs photography and ghosts within his text to unsettle official history and to offer a melancholic approach to the past of apartheid and its ongoing effects in post-apartheid South Africa.

Decolonizing female consciousness in Bessie Head's A Question of Power

ABSTRACTIn A Question of Power, Bessie Head explores how South Africa's apartheid history has been transcribed upon female bodies. Head interrogates female madness as a vehicle to transverse and recollect the historical memories and personal stories of apartheid South Africa. In this essay, I explore the socio-cultural, racialized and gendered political stories that shape female identity during times of political transition. In so doing, I examine the dialectical interplay between good and evil within the borderlands of a world divided by race and gender. I proffer that Head's “soul evolution,” as she refers to it, is intrinsically connected to the sexual dynamics of masculine power and the struggle for self-autonomy.

The Pursuit of Inclusion in Unequal Contemporary Cities. Learning from Cape Town Desegregation

One of the greatest challenges of contemporary cities is to engage with their emerging inequality. This research argues that public spaces play a key role in contrasting the process of this growing marginalization. The objective of this paper is to determine whether it is possible to contrast the spatial disparity within the contemporary cities, through the design of more “just” and inclusive spaces. In the past two decades South Africa has been the subject of many studies regarding inequality and segregation, because of its entrenched history of apartheid and its severe imbalanced income distribution. The desegregation process of Cape Town has been attempting to use public space as social infrastructure to bridge its divide. Firstly, the shift towards a more inclusive city happened in academic writing. Secondly, the shift also occurs in municipal public space programmes. And lastly, the shift materialized in several innovative projects, which have been carried out mainly in township areas. Through the analysis of this progression, it is possible to delineate some visible improvements – punctual but fundamental steps towards a “city for all.”

Conceptions of Contraceptive Use in Rural KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa: Lessons for Programming.

Community family planning programmes in South Africa arose from the controversial apartheid history of controlling the African population while encouraging the growth of European migrant population. Post-apartheid population policies shifted away from population control to aligning policies to the global agenda that placed emphasis on the link between population and development. The focus on population and development polices in post-apartheid South Africa is on social equality, justice and peace rather than controlling sections of the population. Given the shift, this paper interrogates the conceptions of contraceptive use among rural communities in KwaZulu-Natal. Our primary objective is to understand the dynamics surrounding access to and use of family planning services in peri-urban and rural areas of KwaZulu-Natal. Using focus group data, the findings of the study suggest that different social categories interact with the family planning programmes differently. How teenagers and married women perceive the value of family planning differs. Gender differences regarding the use of condoms are also evident. The paper attempts to grapple with the non-use of condoms despite the knowledge that these prevent pregnancy and provide protection from sexually-transmitted diseases. The contribution of this paper lies in its identification of socio-cultural factors and the political economy underlying the different attitudes towards contraceptive use in rural KwaZulu-Natal.

Apartheid's Immorality Act and the fiction of heteronormative whiteness

This article traces both the centrality and fragility of the figure of the heterosexual white male to the moral and ideological core of the apartheid regime. Through a comparative reading of Zakes Mda's The Madonna of Excelsior (2002) and Gerald Kraak's Ice in the Lungs (2006), the article examines how apartheid's Immorality Act functioned as the legislative mechanism to produce and police heteronormative whiteness. The randomness and unpredictability of sexual desire in both historical novels expose the tenuousness of this idealised heteronormative whiteness that lay at the centre of the apartheid project. Situated within the moral panic and political turmoil of the 1970s, the novels identify sex as a powerful lens through which to read the history of apartheid. While Mda's satirical novel focuses on transgressive interracial sexual desire, Kraak's realist text explores same-sex desire and intimacy. My reading of the two novels engages with the political history of apartheid's sexual policing and insists on the inextricable entanglement of its heteronormative and racial supremacist provisions. The traditional ideological centrality of the vulnerable white woman is displaced in the novels by white men whose transgressive sexual desires for black women (in Mda's novel) and other white men (in Kraak's) refuse the certainty and naturalness of heteronormative whiteness.

FEELING THEIR WAY

In a bid to step away from a history of apartheid centred on African andAfrikaner nationalisms, the article redirects attention towards the white South AfricanEnglish-speaking community. An analysis of the emotional practices employed in the SouthAfrican English-language press on Rhodesian unilateral independence in 1965 define theemotion work these practices carry out. The article concludes that this emotion work createscertain emotional narratives, which nuance a conventional view of the English-speaker as“unknown” and his attitudes towards the racial dilemma in South Africa as aloof, thusrevealing a hitherto unprecedented proactivity in the English-speaker.

Museums as Tools for Understanding Slavery and its Legacies in South Africa

This article explores how slavery is represented in South African museums and how this history is examined in relation to later histories of apartheid. The interconnected histories of structural racism and intergenerational dispossession are frequently portrayed as distinct and unrelated. Perhaps owing much to the decades of silence which clouded the subject, South African museums widely approach slavery with little reference to its contemporary legacies in the country. The state-funded flagship museums of Freedom Park in Pretoria and the Iziko Slave Lodge in Cape Town are considered as examples of sites whereby representations of slavery may be constrained by national narratives. The privately funded museums on the wine estate of Solms-Delta are then highlighted as an example of how memory work can help to form new understandings of self by focusing on the distant past. The article then considers how slavery is represented in Simon's Town as an example of how local histories have been selectively constructed in South Africa, and suggests that the approach taken at Solms-Delta could successfully function in other localities.

Mapping the black queer geography of Johannesburg's lesbian women through narrative

To be black, working class, living in a township and lesbian is to be a discordant body. This is a markedly different experience than being a socio-economically privileged resident of Johannesburg. This paper sets out to map marginalised sexualities onto existing social fissures emerging out of South Africa's divided history of apartheid. It argues that while the repeal of the Sexual Offences Act, 1957 (Act No. 23 of 1957, previously the Immorality Act, 1927) and the promulgation of the Civil Union Bill (2006) has had a liberating effect on the lesbian community of Johannesburg; the occupation of physical space is deeply informed by the intersecting confluence of race, class, age, sexuality, and place. Based on the stories of black lesbian women, the paper analyses the occupation of the city's social spaces to map the differential access to lesbian rights and exposure to prejudice and violence. Findings suggest that their agential movement through space and performances of resistance lends a nuance to the dominant script of victimhood. Their narratives of becoming are shaped by the spaces that they inhabit in both liberating and disempowering ways.

‘VIPsm’, A Threat to Social Stability in South Africa: From Apartheid Exclusions to Democratized Inequalities

Abstract The object of this article is to present a critical analysis of the impact of the notion of ‘VIPsm’, a phenomenon through which human beings are socially ‘categorized’ or ‘classed’ according to status or wealth or position being held in society. The article is predicated on South Africa’s discernible constitutional pursuit of attaining social stability and equitable social justice. This work is also considerate of the country’s known unpleasant history of apartheid’s acute race-based social exclusions, and in contrast, the post 1994 persistent social and economic inequalities which thus far proliferates material disadvantage, poverty, social discontent and protests amongst citizens. The article employed ‘Transformational Leadership theory ‘and ‘Power and Influence theories’ as tools of analysis, given that the Constitution, 1996 is transformative in nature and thus require ‘transformational leaders’ in order to achieve its major goal of burying wounds of the past, to build one unified nation that is socially stable. It is asserted that social challenges and superfluous differential treatment of humans besieging contemporary South Africa are suggestive of the presence of leadership that is self-centered, opulence driven, and has little or no regard for the poor and thus, disfavor the solidarity principle.