Apartheid Politics Research Articles

Exploring ecofeminism, ecocriticism, aquapoetics, and environmental humanities in Gabeba Baderoon's poetry

In this article I focus on Gabeba Baderoon's engagement with nature and the ecological nuances in her poetry. Baderoon is an accomplished South African poet with four poetry collections to date: The Dream in the Next Body (2005), The Museum of Ordinary Life (2005), A hundred silences (2006), and The History of Intimacy (2018). These poetry collections sustain Baderoon's ecofeminist sensibility as she engages with South Africa's eco-environmental challenges. In expanding the scope of how ecology impacts on poetry, I strive to illustrate how Baderoon's poetry is intimately bound up with the tropes of environmental humanities, ecofeminism, ecocriticism, and aquapoetics. I interrogate Baderoon's engagement with ecological concerns in South Africa. Previous critical works about her poetry often discount how her poetry creatively harnesses ecopoetic tropes to illustrate the problematics of ecological concerns, climate change, and environmental crises. Rather, they often fixate on the portrayal of racial politics of apartheid as it culminated in the poverty of black people in her poetry. Interestingly, Baderoon does not enforce a strict and total division between these thematic concerns in her poetry collections. I argue in this article that, within the framework of commitment to ecological values, Baderoon explores the relationship between human and non-human agencies in her poetry. Arguably, the conception of human relations with the environment enables Baderoon to advocate for the protection of plants, animals, and water resources for a sustainable ecosystem.

The Construction of Orientalism in Doris Lessing's The Grass is Singing

This article studies the construction of Orientalism in the novel The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. Doris Lessing is a British writer born in Persia who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2007. As a white writer, Lessing is known as a writer who fights for the rights of the black community. Still, in this novel, she sharpens the negative image of the blacks as described in the theory of Orientalism. Orientalism focuses on the West’s view of the East. In the novel, Orientalism was carried out by The West against The East, represented by Mary Turner as white people and Moses as the black. This study aims to dismantle the Orientalist discourse in the novel. The study applied the theory of Orientalism proposed by Edward Said (1979). The Orientalist discourse in The Grass is Singing is constructed in the form of stereotypes and oppression against the black people in Southern Rhodesia. Racism, colonialism, and the politics of Apartheid done by white people in the novel showcase the white superiority toward the inferior black.

Apartheid policy in South Africa

Racial discrimination is a very big problem and is found in several countries such as the United States, Great Britain and the most dominant in South Africa with the policy of apartheid. Therefore, South Africa is at the center of the fight against racism towards achieving justice. The word apartheid means "separation" in the African language and it describes the racial rigidity that governs the division between the minority white population and the majority white population. The struggle of the majority of black Africans against the domination of white minorities is the main and last racial conflict. The international community actively encourages it. However, the white group was large enough and too strong while the black power was so weak and divided, that in the end a person named Nelson Mandela appeared, who was active in the struggle for the elimination of the politics of apartheid in South Africa on the grounds that racial crises and conflicts would arise. what happened there was soon over and South Africa became an auspicious country.

Kontribusi Muslim Minoritas dalam Menggulingkan Rezim Apartheid Di Afrika Selatan (1948-1994)

This thesis aims to describe and analyze: (1) The history of the emergence of apartheid politics in South Africa, and (2) The contribution of Muslims in opposing the apartheid regime in South Africa with the period 1948-1994. This type of research focuses on library reseach. Some of the steps used in researching the object of study are heuristics, verification, interpretation, and historiography or what is often referred to as historical research methodology. The results of this study show that: First, apartheid politics officially lasted for forty-two years (1948-1990). This is against the backdrop of a white group that feels that it is superior to the black group that is seen as slaves, servants. Apartheid, which means separation, was formed with the aim of maintaining the purity of his race, so that to realize it Malan who won the 1948 elections made a kind of political policy strategy that later developed into discrimination against blacks. Second, The policy of implementing apartheid politics that oppresses many blacks, including Muslims, triggers resistance and resistance to the political policies implemented. This movement was realized by a series of Muslim organizations, such as CMYM, CMYA, Al-Qibla and The Call of Islam that strongly opposed the practice of oppression of apartheid regimes. The foundation of thinking used in this study refers to Max Weber's theory of social action.

PRACTICE OF RACISM IN SOUTH AFRICA POST-APARTHEID

This paper aims to describe: First, the background of the rise of apartheid politics in South Africa. Second, the implementation of apartheid politics in South Africa in 2016-2019. Third, the reaction to the implementation of apartheid politics in South Africa in 2016-2019 and fourth, South Africa after the apartheid period. These four descriptions are to answer the main problem of the occurrence of racist practices in post-apartheid South Africa. The research method uses qualitative with international relations science approach. This research is a descriptive-analytic study, a research that uses a pattern of describing the state of empirical facts with descriptive arguments that are relevant. Then, the results of the description are followed by analysis to draw analytic conclusions. To identify and discuss this problem, the author uses the concept of national identity and racist theory and ethnicity theory. The results of this study indicate that: First, the emergence of apartheid politics in South Africa, was motivated by three things namely historical background, racial background of white supremacy and economic background. Second, the implementation of apartheid politics in South Africa in 2016-2019 was systematically institutionalized and contained in discriminatory laws and applied in various aspects of life, especially in the social, political and economic fields. Third, the reaction to the implementation of apartheid politics in South Africa in 2016-2019 came from within the country and abroad. Fourth, the situation in South Africa after apartheid is the emergence of Xenophobia and its impact on the economic, social and political fields. The practice of racism in South Africa still exists where they still consider racial and skin differences to be very strong and whites still feel they are superior to blacks. This has caused South Africa to be underdeveloped in the economic, political and social fields.

Apartheid Politics in South Africa

Racial discrimination is a very big problem and is found in several countries such as the United States, Britain and the most dominant in South Africa with Apartheid politics. Therefore, South Africa is the focus of the fight against racism towards the realization of justice. The word Apartheid means "separation" in African language and it describes the racial rigidity that governs the division between the white minority population and the majority white population. The struggle of the majority of black Africans against the dominance of white minorities is the main and final racial conflict. The international community actively encourages it. However, the white group was quite a lot and was too strong while the black power was so weak and divided, that in the end a person named Nelson Mandela would appear who was active in fighting for the elimination of Apartheid politics in South Africa, on the grounds that racial crises and conflicts would arise. what happened there was soon over and South Africa became a conducive country.

The Seeds of Destruction: Naturalism, Hysteria, and the Beautiful Soul in Lewis Nkosi’sMating Birds

If V. S. Naipaul’s late fiction demonstrates the crisis of narrative in the arrested dialectic of what I have called postcolonial naturalism, then the work of South African novelist, playwright, and critic Lewis Nkosi epitomizes the intersection of postcolonial naturalism with the double-voiced discourse of the hysteric. Situated between a post-independence melancholy and the registration of globalization’s volatile new dispensation and refracted through the racial politics of apartheid and its end as well as the lived experience of exile, Nkosi’s apartheid-era debut novelMating Birdsarticulates in both form and content the noble self-exemption of Hegel’s “Beautiful Soul” and the subversive anxiety of the hysteric, to whom no satisfaction can be given. Such an accounting helps to reframe split critical appraisal of the novel by reading its complex of form and content as the living crystallization of historical processes.

Programmes of frivolity on ice? Hockey, business, diasporic identity and apartheid in South Africa, 1936-1992

South Africa has a surprisingly long history of the sport perhaps most usually associated with the northern hemisphere: ice hockey. Ice skating was first introduced in the country in the last decade of the nineteenth century as a commercial venture. Entrepreneurs built ice rinks for profit-making purposes and brought showmen from overseas to demonstrate the sport. An ancillary activity was the establishment of ice hockey clubs in 1936 and beyond. Given the strong profit motive, personal and tactical differences between the chief investors and sports administrators inevitably left its imprint on the sport. The extensive involvement of German, Canadian and Swiss immigrants throughout the twentieth century also co-determined the eventual character of the sport. From its inception through to 1991, ice hockey practised racial segregation, operated within apartheid laws and remained an exclusively white activity. Unsurprisingly, the apartheid ice rink also became embroiled in global politics, became a target of the worldwide anti-apartheid sports boycott and was excluded from all international competition from the late 1960s until 1991. This article reclaims some of ice hockey's neglected history in South Africa and investigates the interplay of sport, ice rink entrepreneurship, imperial and foreign identity, and apartheid politics during the twentieth century.

Experimental Tactics on an Uneven Playing Field: Multinational Football and the Apartheid Project during the 1970s

Within the growing body of academic literature on South African sport, there remains room for considering the close relationship between football and apartheid politics during the 1970s. Drawing on archival documentation and contemporary media reports, this analysis constitutes a contribution in this regard. The primary focus is on three high-profile football tournaments that were played within the framework of the apartheid government’s multinational sports policy, devised in the early 1970s. Consequently, this represents an exploration of the complex contours of multinational football under apartheid. It will be argued that football was a significant tool for experimentation during the 1970s and a deeper analysis of these ventures is needed in order to gain an improved understanding of sport’s complicated – and often paradoxical – relationship with apartheid.

Class Struggle for the 21st Century: Racial Inequality, International Solidarity, and the New Apartheid Politics

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J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and the Temporality of Injury

ABSTRACTContrasting the historical injuries of apartheid politics with contemporary violence in postapartheid South Africa, J. M. Coetzee’s novel Disgrace explores how competing past and present claims of victimization may be reconciled. While critics generally remark on the inability of existing legal frameworks to adequately address the way in which experience is shaped by identity, few have remarked on the temporal dimension of postapartheid South African social relations. This essay considers the way in which temporality modifies and undermines the role of identity claims in contemporary frameworks of justice. It argues that historical injury must be understood not as belonging to identity but as mediated by the temporality of embodied experience. By recognizing historical injury not as static object but as lived affective orientation toward the present, this essay suggests we might create a productive opening for rethinking existing social justice paradigms.

Editorial Comment

Editorial Comment Joanne Tompkins I was struck by an aspect of April Sizemore-Barber’s essay in this issue, “A Queer Transition: Whiteness in the Prismatic, Post-Apartheid Drag Performances of Pieter-Dirk Uys and Steven Cohen.” In her discussion of two examples of drag performance in South Africa, she explains that “[w]hereas a prism deconstructs light into its many-hued parts, creating a flattened conception of a rainbow (nation), a prismatic performance reflects and refracts the emotional investments projected onto it by varied audiences.” This general issue is itself prismatic, drawing together essays and approaches from a range of genres, nations, and reading perspectives. Each refracts perspectives and approaches (as well as responses) in multiple directions in its specific discussion, but together the essays provide a kaleidoscopic perspective that builds on numerous types of emotional investments (from creators, audiences, and critics) and deftly draws out what we might consider to be different colors and patterns of theatre and performance. The first essay in this issue offers an excellent example of prismatic performance. In “Casting Clara Fisher: Phrenology, Protean Farce, and the ‘Astonishing’ Career of a Child Actress,” Marlis Schweitzer brings to light the fascinating story of Clara Fisher, a prodigy who was famous on the English stage for several decades in the early nineteenth century. Her career is in itself worth elucidating, given her commanding portrayal of Richard III while she was still less than 10 years old. But Schweitzer’s argument extends well beyond Fisher’s biography to the then-scientific method of phrenology by entwining with her story the work of the well-known phrenologist George Combe. The essay engages with Combe’s creation of a plaster cast of Fisher’s head, one of his many attempts to reveal the secret workings of the human brain. Combe’s analysis of Fisher’s ability to act was influenced by his own interest in performance—specifically, his connections with the Siddons family. Combe used Fisher’s cast not just to develop his theories, but also to assist him in his lecture tours, which were performances in their own right. The specifics are themselves productive accounts of archival research, well-situated in their historical moments, but Schweitzer expands on her examples to address the relationships between theatre and science. She moves on to skillfully address the ways in which the cast, which is both a human representation and nonhuman, exemplifies a trace of Fisher, or what Rebecca Schneider, whose work she cites, refers to as “affective stains.” The essay makes a major contribution to the understanding of the significance of the relationship between science and theatre during the nineteenth century. Sizemore-Barber’s essay is next, in which she compares South African performer Pieter-Dirk Uys’s most famous persona, Evita Bezuidenhout, with that of his compatriot, the performance artist Steven Cohen. She traces the development of these performers’ careers against the politics of apartheid and post-apartheid South Africa: one used comedy and satire while the other performed what he terms “monster drag” to play with gender boundaries against racial borders. If Uys’s Evita deployed comedy to challenge the politics of the apartheid regime, Cohen’s performances took advantage of what Sizemore-Barber calls “shocking guerilla interventions” that were “alien in whatever [End Page vii] landscape he inhabited” to draw attention to “the values given to post-apartheid bodies and the darker shadows that haunted the narrative of the rainbow nation.” She investigates the incongruity of drag in South Africa, where both performers operated among and against the politics of the day, before and after the end of apartheid, and especially at the time of the first democratic elections in 1994. Using selected moments in the careers of each performer between 1990 and 2001, Sizemore-Barber draws together a powerful argument about “prismatic performance,” the nature of which I have described at the top of this editorial comment. This prismatic performance reveals a queering of whiteness, a further ambiguous legacy of both whiteness and the rainbow narrative in what she calls the “post-rainbow era.” She concludes with a brief account of the legacy of these performers by drawing attention to examples of the work of young...

Waste of a white skin: the Carnegie Corporation and the racial logic of white vulnerability

List of Illustrations Preface: Possessions, Belonging, Companionship, or Don't Mind the Gap Introduction 1. Forgeries of History: The Poor White Study 2. The Visual Culture of White Poverty as the History of South Africa and the United States: Repetition, Rediscovery, Playing with Whiteness 3. The White Primitive: Whiteness Studies, Embodiment, Invisibility, Property 4. The Roots of White Poverty: Cheap, Lazy, Inefficient ... Black 5. Origin Stories about Segregationist Philanthropy 6. Carnegie in Africa and the Knowledge Politics of Apartheid: Research Agendas not Taken 7. I'll Give You Something to Cry About: The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family Conclusion: Race Makes Nation Acknowledgments Appendixes Notes Selected Bibliography Index

Repeating Fundamentalism and the Politics of the Commons: The Charlie Hebdo Tragedy and the Contradictions of Global Capitalism

I argue that the Charlie Hebdo massacre, and the issue of fundamentalist terrorism in general, should be examined in relation to the contradictions of living in a neoliberal global capitalist system. These contradictions are played out at the political, cultural, and ideological levels in a way that obscures the fundamental antagonism, making any radical solution to the problem of fundamentalist terrorism beyond our reach. I examine these contradictions in four different themes around which the issue of fundamentalist terrorism is staged within the hegemonic neoliberal global capitalist order: the clash of civilizations; colonial and postcolonial politics; leftist solidarity; and the failure of all practical solutions in the fight against fundamentalist terrorism. I end the piece with a call for rethinking the issue of fundamentalist terrorism within the politics of the commons. When the tragic news of the most recent terrorist attack in Paris broke out, the Western media coverage of the massacre sounded all too familiar. From the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the Charlie Hebdo massacre, the signs of the Islamophobic narrative about Islamist (not Islamic) terrorism have become too easily recognizable. Nonetheless, the issue of Islamist terrorism in mainstream media is still framed within a neoliberal ideology that fails to look into the root causes of fundamentalist terrorism, Islamist, or otherwise, around the world in relation to the intensification of predatory forms of capitalist development and its corollary apartheid politics and practices of enclosure. Similarly, any analysis of the coverage of fundamentalist terrorism as symptomatic of the racist, Islamophobic public and official discourses in the US get it half right. Politically speaking, global capitalism is turning larger segments of people in the global South into an uncounted and discardable excess who exist outside state power, the market, and the international political order, making them easily vulnerable to reactionary, extremist movements. However, the neoliberal framework makes the struggle, today, between groups that are anchored in their exclusivist, identitarian thinking, rather than between the global capitalist system itself and the “radical universality” of the dispossessed and disposable surplus of the world population. In this paper, I argue that the issue of fundamentalist terrorism, as it has been framed in the media representation of the Charlie Hebdo massacre, should be understood in the context of the contradictions of living in the shadow of the neoliberal global capitalist system. These contradictions are played out in four different themes that obscure the fundamental antagonism within the hegemonic neoliberal global capitalist order: the clash of civilizations master-narrative; colonial/postcolonial politics in the new age of empire; leftist solidarity politics; and the failure of all practical solutions in the fight against fundamentalist terrorism. Any radical solution to the problem of fundamentalist terrorism, it is suggested, can be reconfigured only within the politics of the commons.

Policy opportunities to enhance the role of smallholder livestock systems in Limpopo Province of South Africa

Post-apartheid administrations in South Africa were faced with redressing the legacy of multifaceted poverty and social inequalities created by apartheid politics. The entrance of smallholder farmers into the mainstream economy became a government priority and policy aim. Institutional efforts in Limpopo Province provided infrastructure to establish poultry and vegetable producing enterprises. Very few livestock projects were funded. The success rate of institutional interventions was low. We argue that smallholder livestock systems offer policy opportunities to realise post-apartheid reform goals in the smallholder livestock sector. The premises are; there are more livestock in communal smallholder sector than in the commercial sector. This indicates there is a substantial level of natural, human and social capital existing within smallholder livestock systems. Secondly, commercial livestock systems are increasingly converted to game and wildlife enterprises necessitating imports of large numbers of livestock from Namibia to account for the shortfall in red-meat in South Africa. It is possible that the low off-take characterising smallholder livestock and the Cattle Complex Philosophy probably deterred past efforts to recognise the potential of smallholder livestock systems for rural and agricultural development. The Cattle Complex Philosophy claims that African smallholders have an attitudinal resistance to sell livestock. Data from a survey amongst 193 households in ten villages of Sekhukhune District of Limpopo Province illustrates that low livestock sales relates to the dysfunctional composition, sub-optimal reproductive potential and high calf mortality of smallholder herds. Conclusions and policy recommendations are offered. Keywords: Smallholder, Livestock, Limpopo Province

MARIKANA AND THE LIMITS OF BIOPOLITICS: THEMES IN THE RECENT SCHOLARSHIP OF SOUTH AFRICAN MINING

Despite our jaded familiarity with very high levels of public violence the police massacre of mineworkers at Marikana in August 2012 came as a physical shock to South Africans. The events seemed in so many ways to be a surreal flashback to a repudiated past; from the grim video footage of police armoured vehicles, tear gas and barbed wire to the bent-over groups of men, proudly displaying what the Inkatha Freedom Party used to call traditional weapons. There were undeniable differences, of course: the presence of uncontrolled videographers on the site not the least amongst them. Yet, in the months that followed the massacre, it has become increasingly clear that Marikana was much less a return to the politics of apartheid than a symptom of the preservation of deeply formed structures of politics within the mining industry. We had, in short, little justification for our surprise.

Negotiating the ‘(Ab)normality’ of (Anti-)Apartheid: Transnational Relations within a Dutch-South African Family

This article examines how the politics of Apartheid manifested themselves in networks that connected South Africa and the Netherlands. It analyses the transfer of narratives, images, ideas and political practices within a transnational kinship network, as well as through networks of political activists in both countries and worldwide. The footage a Dutch documentary maker shot during the 1980s, especially his focus on his well-established, ‘white’ relatives from South Africa and their encounters with ‘black’ compatriots, is used to trace these transnational dynamics. His material reveals the various narratives and markers of whiteness by which his relatives presented their privileged position in Apartheid South Africa as ‘normal’, while interviews with the filmmaker and some of his relatives in South Africa and the Netherlands some 25 years later give insights in how their performances were reshaped and received as ‘abnormal’ within the Dutch political context at the time. The post-apartheid memory work involved, show how the political and moral dilemmas are still felt to this day.

Mind the Gap

The spaces and tensions between races, ethnic groups, and communities in late Apartheid and post-1994 South African society, and the co-existence of different languages, religions and cultures, generated a society so fractured that cultural translation became a formidably difficult task. The concept of translation in a transforming society is examined through an analysis of two-dimensional language as a means of translating political events and experiences into visual forms, which attempt to communicate across cultural gaps. Iconic documentary photographs by Sam Nzima (1976) and Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC) photographers (1997), struggle posters by co-operatives and formally trained designers, and artworks by Kevin Brand, Sue Williamson and Marion Arnold are discussed. The images reveal that different forms of visual representation encode different relationships of signifying content and aesthetic form to offer alternatives to speech and writing in communicating some implications of Apartheid politics, leaving a legacy that validates art and design as tools of political activism.

Not Yet Uhuru: The Unfinished Revolution in Africa

In Kwandiwe Kondlo’s In the Twilight of the Revolution (2009), which examines the role of the Pan-Africanist Congress (PAC) of Azania in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle as the backdrop, this article surveys the momentum of social revolution in Sub-Saharan Africa during the decolonization era that started in the mid-20th century and ended with South Africa’s transition to a multi-racial democracy in 1994. It argues that the failure of the African elite to achieve a genuine independence from both colonial rule and South Africa’s apartheid system is largely because of inconsistent nationalist ideologies and the detachment of the African elite from the popular struggles of the people, which could have resulted in the revolutionary overthrow of the colonial state and the dawn of more progressive and autonomous states all across Black Africa. It concludes that this failure led to the continuing instability of the post-colonial states across Africa and, in South Africa, to the achievement of a particular form of multi-racial democracy with very little or no change to the real politics of apartheid and Boer domination.

THE PAIN OF RACISM IN THE MAKING OF A ‘COOLIE DOCTOR’

Histories of Afro-Asian solidarity rarely dwell on intimacy, yet they tend to presume an affective reciprocity between people of African and Asian descent that has come to define postcolonial politics in its characteristically utopian form. In fact, there is every indication that the terms of endearment between African and Indian communities were strained at best across the landscapes of the decolonized and decolonizing world – and that narratives of fraternity are not the whole story of interracial contact, intimate or otherwise. This essay focuses on the life story of K. G. Naidoo (1906–99), a Tamil doctor known as Dr Goonam who treated Indian, coloured and African patients and whose practice drew her into the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa. Her autobiography, Coolie Doctor, is an intimate history of racial knowledge that challenges easy readings of solidarity or conflict between Indians and Africans in and around twentieth-century Durban. Goonam's text allows us to appreciate the embodied experience of interracial hierarchy in the context of both progressive medicine and anti-racist politics of the kind that was unfolding in South Africa in the 1940s and after. I read Coolie Doctor as an embodied, materialist account of African–Indian relationships in the context of apartheid politics in KwaZulu-Natal – an account that, in turn, archives histories of racial encounter, collision and citation with ramifications for postcolonial histories of all kinds.