South African History Research Articles

The Paradox of Freedom and Fear in Athol Fugard’s My Children! My Africa!

The history of South Africa is characterised by fear that stems from violent colonisation by Europeans who had their own interests and neglected the needs of the original inhabitants of the land. The descendants of the colonisers made matters worse with the introduction of apartheid, which saw the implementation of discriminatory policies that included the forced removals of black people from their own land. This article traces and interrogates the fight for freedom by black South Africans against apartheid, a fight that can be described as brutal and accompanied by fear. This fight is nuancedly represented by Athol Fugard in one of his plays, My Children! My Africa! (1989), in which he links fear with the quest for freedom. Applying postcolonial theory to the play, this article argues that Fugard’s representation of apartheid’s oppression of black people complicates understandings of the concept of freedom by making freedom and fear inseparable.

“The Great Lesbian Monster Show”: GLOW’s Lesbian Forum Navigating Johannesburg, South Africa, 1991–1995

The inner city of Johannesburg, South Africa, was regarded as a relatively gay-friendly space from the 1970s into the 1990s, but much of the research that interrogates this does so from an overwhelmingly gay and male lens. In this research, I seek to disrupt the view that Johannesburg’s gay subculture was dominated by gay men, and instead seek to examine the politico-queer spaces that lesbian women occupied. Queer literature often regards gay men as the norm within academic studies. In this article, I highlight the importance of lesbian women within South African history. I place the voices and movements of lesbian women within broader ongoing research in queer southern African history. Within this larger history the voices of women are further marginalised while those of gay men are brought to the fore. In this article, I seek to correct this by examining the prominence of lesbian women with South Africa’s gay and lesbian spaces in the 1990s. In order to examine these spaces, I analyse the Lesbian Forum, a group directly linked to the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW). In this article, I argue that the intricacies of Johannesburg was vital to allowing women in the Lesbian Forum a space to operate.

“The most hidden open secret”: Interview with Uhuru Phalafala on Mine Mine Mine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023), conducted by Helene Strauss

abstract In this interview, we hope to take up this Special Issue’s concern with the intersections between gender activism, climate justice, and artistic practice. As a work that charts the poet’s deeply personal connection with the climate crisis through the toxic burdens placed on her family by South African histories of mining and migrant labour, Mine Mine Mine offers an exemplary instantiation of Black feminist artistic praxis as climate activism. Crucially, the poet challenges concepts and framings that have been utilised to speak to climate and racialised issues, often separated if not entirely erasing the latter issue. Her epic poem and reflections in this interview reveal intricate and inextricable imbrications of social justice and environmental justice with colonial race-making as foundation. The poet clearly demonstrates that the same mechanisms that extracted and exploited the environment engineered racism, racialised and mechanised particular bodies to serve those purposes, resulting in their mutual spiritual and embodied extraction. Discourses on climate or environmental justice continue to fall in the traps of thinking through these issues without centring colonial capitalism and geopolitical gendered race politics. This interview brings these intersections to the fore, offering textualities and vocabularies to reframe and language their coalescence. In positing the “Black eco”, the poet offers a cosmology that pre-existed colonial cosmology, one teeming with life, spirit, reciprocity, care, and relation with others and the living world, human and non-human, pushing us to enrich our conceptualisation from climate justice towards the “Eco”: ecological justice. Climate justice singles out the weather as phenomena that, while causal to human activity in the making of modernity, is outside of ourselves. “Eco” suggests a web of life that was ostensibly wrecked by environmental and human destruction, but that is operative and upheld by some indigenous societies and their cosmologies. In offering us “geopoetics”, the poet grapples with grammars of the geopolitical as intertwined with spiritual and embodied extraction in the making of modernity and its ongoing violence. The interview enriches some of the many questions raised by the volume about racial capitalism’s destructive environmental legacies through considering their impact on black sociality, reproduction, and the capacity to breathe.

Hope Springs Eternal

When South Africa is covered in the Swedish media, the focus is often on the history of South Africa, the role of Sweden in theanti-apartheid movement and, in more recent years, the political and socio-economic landscape of postapartheid South Africa, marked by increased wealth gaps, social unrest, and corruption. How South Africa is covered by foreign media is important and politicians, as well as businesses and organisations such as Investment South Africa, Brand South Africa, and South African Tourism, keep a keen eye on the media as a gauge for maintaining diplomatic relations, as well as for attracting foreign investment. As a former journalist who has covered South Africa for Scandinavian media, I have had ample opportunity to ponder and research the media coverage of SouthAfrica and the African continent in the Swedish media, as well as Scandinavian and wider international media. Drawing upon my own experience, as well as an analysis of coverage of South Africa in the Swedish news media, I ask what the image of South Africa isin the Swedish media, how this has changed over the last 30 years and, importantly, what this might mean for South African-Swedish relations?

The Incompatibility of Humanism in the South African Constitution with Neoliberal Governmentality

Abstract The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa is a momentous text in the history of South Africa’s liberation from the apartheid regime. It marks a break with the old regime, which sought to protect the prosperity of the country’s white minority while oppressing the black majority. The shift posited in the Constitution was clearly legal, but it was also conceptual. It was written with the intention to change the normative structure and principles of justification. As I will argue, it puts forward a normative discourse based on humanism. Since humanism has a rocky history, rife with exclusion and subjugation, it is important to clarify the sort of humanism contained in the Constitution of South Africa as one which understands the human as a site of potential. Although the Constitution may place value on such a humanism, it is not clear that our other social discourses cohere with this apprehension of the human. Specifically, I claim that the tendency in South African discourse (in various realms) to deploy neoliberal reason is at odds with the humanism outlined in the South African Constitution and therefore also does not allow for its actualisation.

The Road Not Travelled: Tracking Love in Frank Anthony’s The Journey: The Revolutionary Anguish of Comrade B

The Journey (1991) is a virtually unknown “struggle” novel by Frank Anthony (d. 1993), a senior member of the African People’s Democratic Union of Southern Africa (APDUSA), who was incarcerated on Robben Island for six years. The novel and its author have been elided from South African history as a racialized literary establishment and the defensiveness of the resistance organization of which he was a member reinforced each other in tacit censorship. Anthony’s novel presents revealing insights into the repression of the personal in the anti-apartheid movement, which reflected the “liquidation” of love in leftist discourse of the period. The importance of love, especially romantic love– the highly volatile emotion which is often boundary-breaking and radically transformative–has been recognized in contemporary postMarxism and critical race theory. Blindness to the potential of love in dominant struggle politics is reflected in the protagonist of The Journey, whose passion for social justice leads, paradoxically, to repression of the empowerment and emancipation of self(lessness) through other(s), enabled by eros.

Time, source, and responsibility: understanding changing uses of the past in ‘post-conflict’ South African history teaching, 1998 and 2019

ABSTRACT We propose a new framework for understanding post-conflict history education based on ethnographic fieldwork in the same South African school two decades apart. We explore how and why teachers engage with the legacies of conflict in 1998 and 2019 by investigating how they draw boundaries around 1) time, what the conflict period is and how stark lines are between past and present; 2) source, where knowledge resides and legitimacy of expertise and lived experience; and 3) responsibility, who creates and who benefits from social change, particularly vis-à-vis individual and collective action. We suggest that by looking at why, how, where, and by whom these lines between past/present, historiography/experience, and individual/structural responsibility are drawn, we can strengthen comparative approaches to understanding post-conflict history education.

“We Are Claiming Space, We Are Visible!”: The Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand as a Space of Solidarity, 1980s–1990s

This article seeks to reintegrate the history of the Gay and Lesbian Organisation of the Witwatersrand (GLOW) into southern African queer historiography, which has inadvertently sidelined the role of the organisation, ignoring the plight of GLOW’s activists, as well as many others, mostly black gays and lesbians. Through the use of archival material and interviews with former GLOW members, this article examines GLOW’s role in connecting the gay liberation struggle to the anti-apartheid struggle. The article interrogates GLOW’s role in South Africa’s anti-apartheid struggle, which helped align gay and lesbian rights with the broader idea of rights for all citizens at a time in South African history when being against rights for any group of people was deemed unacceptable. This article further examines the various schisms within GLOW that facilitated its eventual decline, but which also made the organisation multi-layered. These multiple aspects of GLOW were crucial in creating solidarity between gays and lesbians who were able to successfully fight for a Constitution that would protect the rights of non-heteronormative society.

Materials Necessary for the Formation of a Correct Knowledge of the History of Colonialism in South Africa? Reassessing the Historical Productions of Donald Moodie and Their Implications

ABSTRACT The contribution of the Rev. Dr John Philip and Donald Moodie to South African historiography has received some attention from historians, but the extent and duration of Moodie’s attempts to challenge Philip’s version of South African history have not been quite so fully explored. Nor have Moodie’s subsequent publications. This article examines Moodie’s dispute with Philip and their conflicting conceptions of history, and what Moodie’s less well-known publications reveal about his notions of the history of South Africa. In the process, it rediscovers Moodie’s mysteriously lost only full-length historical narrative and examines what the contestations around the colonial archive in the first half of the nineteenth century reveal about the challenges of the colonial archive and South African historiography today. It suggests that Moodie’s works can be located against a backdrop of conservative British intellectual thought in South Africa and that understanding the influence of Moodie’s publications is important in historicising the development of colonial knowledge systems in South Africa.

Public Histories in South Africa: Between Contest and Reconciliation

Public history has long been practiced in South Africa, yet its content and purpose have always been deeply contested. In a deliberate, state-driven process, it has undergone extensive change since 1994, helping to redefine the nation in the post-apartheid era. There have been two principal means of achieving this goal: the first has been to commission a large number of new memory sites and the second has been to insist on a renovation of older sites, whose previous incarnation served the narrow interests of a small white minority. While clear new narratives have emerged, the process has witnessed continuing contests over representation and competing claims to the heritage estate.

Writing David Livingstone Back into South African History

Very little of the vast literature on David Livingstone treats his decade as a missionary in South Africa, focusing instead on his later expeditions to central Africa. Described as a failed missionary who gave up evangelism for exploring, he came under fire in the second half of the 20th century for leading European imperialism in Africa. A deeper look into Livingstone’s mission experience from 1841 to 1857 shows that his highly original writing on theology, missiology and colonialism ranks alongside the better-known work of South African churchmen such as Johannes van der Kemp, John Philip and J.W. Colenso. His analysis and experience of settler colonialism on the Cape frontier and in the Transvaal were not incidental but central to his decision to seek an east–west corridor for the introduction of commerce and Christianity to a region he hoped might be free of colonial aggression and human trafficking.

Protests and Media Representations: An Intersectional Analysis of the Marikana Massacre (2012), the Johannesburg Protests, and the Phoenix Massacre (2021)

This study contributes to the current body of knowledge that explores how the media creates stereotypes and influences gender parity in society. A vast amount of literature has been published on gender and the media, resulting in sufficient conceptual and theoretical frameworks. Using intersectional analysis, the study examines how media frames, focalizes and represents intersecting roles to shed light on afro-patriarchal frames, stereotypes, and representations. A qualitative analysis of two major events that occurred during South Africa’s post-colonial period, the Marikana Massacre, the Phoenix Massacre which was accompanied by protests in parts of Johannesburg are presented in this study. The study findings highlight that these hallmark incidents in South African history are characterized by nationalistic, capitalist, and gendered discourses. As a result of the Marikana Massacre, the study suggests that the state insisted on pursuing its national interests at all costs, including using force and pushing agendas under the guise of increased nationalism and patriotism. In contrast, the study suggests that the state used limited force against looters and those who burned tyres and factories during the Phoenix Massacre. Moreover, dominant frames connected to state nationalism and upholding capitalism remain linked to intersectional differences in unequal societies. Keywords: Gender, Media, Intersectional Theory; Inequality, Nationalism, Post-colonial, Capitalism

Attributes of African Culture: The Problems of Race and Gender Discriminations

In modern decades, sociologists have increasingly adopted an parallel framework to inspect and explain the complex and interconnected nature of inequalities in the areas of race, class, and gender. The land of Africa has suffered tremendously under the rule of the English colonisers. Racism and Gender discrimination in South Africa has existed throughout the history of South Africa. The effects of racism were still felt today, and South Africa had developed the National Action Plan to fight against Racism, Racial Discrimination, Xenophobia and Related Forms of Intolerance. Women are strongly represented and even over represented in the cultural and creative sector, or at least in some fields of this sector. However, despite what one could think when looking at their quantitive superiority in public cultural institutions or programmes of higher education in cultural management and the arts, the creative sector is far from offering equal opportunities for women and men. The barriers found in the creative sector for women are not different from those observed in other economic sectors. This paper aims to discuss some points on Attributes of African Culture i.e. the problems of race and gender discrimination in Africa.South Africa has a painful history of racism connected to the criminal injustices of the apartheid era, which institutionalised oppression against all people of colour.

Attempts to (re)capture the school history curriculum? Reflections on the history ministerial task team's report

The History Ministerial Task Team Report (HMTT) on the proposed compulsory school history in South Africa was made public in February 2018. Ever since, it has generated many debates and concerns among in- and pre-service history educators, History (of) Education scholars as well as the general public. Many of these concerns are premised on the fear that there is an attempt, at least by the state, through the work of the HMTT to (re)capture school history. This (re)capture, some argue, would deliver a school history that is both nationalist and patriotic in its approach, and glorifies only the African National Congress's (ANC) role in history, much in the same way as the apartheid curriculum glorified the role of the National Party (NP), Afrikaner nationalism and white supremacy thinking. However, we are convinced that there might as well be a different reading of the HMTT and its Report; thus, a different form of (re)capture. In this paper, we will explore, theorise and reflect on the HMTT's work and Report, as well as recent scholarly debates regarding the HMTT itself and its Report. This we do by employing the notion of (re)capture as our theoretical framework which is derived from the current 'state capture' discourse in South Africa. We then use this theoretical lens to review literature on the contested epistemic nature of school history, as well as to read and make sense of the HMTT and its Report. We conclude that those who argue that there are indeed attempts to (re)capture the school history for narrow nationalistic aspirations which are nativist in nature, provide us with a different reading of the HMTT and its report. We contend that the form of (re)capture advanced by the HMTT, and its Report is for a greater cause related to current calls for decolonisation and Africanisation of school history in post-apartheid South Africa - where the colonised ways of knowing and being can also take centre stage in the historical literature and where cognitive, epistemic, existential, and ontological justice is realised.

"Myth" or "construct"?: What students are learning about race in the South African history classroom

History education in post-apartheid South Africa addresses topics that are highly salient to the concept of race. To make sense of colonialism, slavery, the Holocaust, and most notably apartheid, students require an understanding of what race is, and how it has been used to justify discriminatory and unjust behaviour. The South African Curriculum and Policy Statements for Grade 9 History therefore devotes two hours to a topic on "the definition of race" (Department of Basic Education [DBE], 2011a: 43). However, what are students learning about 'the definition of race' from their history education? In this article, we draw on our experience as a history educator and history education researcher to argue that students often develop inaccurate and unhelpful understandings of race. This is partially since both the South African history curricula and textbooks describe race as a "myth" (DBE, 2011a, 43; Bottaro, Cohen, Dilley, Duffett, & Visser, 2013) with no scientific or evolutionary basis. Hence, students who learn that race is a 'myth' understandably struggle to understand discourses and policies that refer to racial identity and are at risk of misunderstanding theories of evolution. While we agree that the concept of race has no legitimate scientific basis, we nonetheless argue that students require an historical understanding of race; one that demonstrates how racial identities have been constructed in different ways and for different purposes over time. Such an approach would introduce students to the extensive historiography of the construction of race (e.g. DuBois, 1940; Dubow, 1995). By understanding race as a construct rather than a myth, we suggest that students will be better able to engage with the legacies of racialised violence as well as the ways in which racial identity is a legitimate source of meaning for many South Africans.

The concepts of ‘Zulu tribe’ and ‘Zulu nation’ and their use towards political aspirations in South Africa

The object of research: This article presents an overview of how the concept of tribe and nation has been manipulated for political end. The first part of the paper clearly establishes that the two concepts are not only different but also represent different epochs in Zulu history.
 Investigated problem: this article interrogates this neglected subject by focusing on how Europeans used different terms to denegrate Africans during colonialism. The main objective is to reveal social agency, showing that the African ethnic groups were also capable of making nations before the arrival of colonialism.
 The main scientific results: The findings of this paper indicated that the concepts ‘tribe’ and ‘nation’ present different epochs in Zulu history therefore using them interchangeably as if they refer to one thing is politically incorrect. Moreover, findings indicated that there is nothing wrong with the words as they are defined by dictionaries but the way in which they were used created confusion.
 Innovative product: The result of this study will be incorporated in our history curriculum, which specifically focuses at how the process of colonization affected the Zulu monarchy.
 The area of practical use of the research results: The study is of importance to South African historians and those who are interested to study the transition of AmaZulu from a tribe to a nation.

Schreiner family narratives: Written and oral sources in biographical research

This article reflects on the research required in biographical studies. The biographical focus is on the role of three generations of the Schreiner family: W.P. Schreiner (one-time Prime Minister of the Cape Colony), Justice O.D. Schreiner (judge of the Appellate Division of the Supreme Court) and Professor G.D.L. Schreiner (scientist, academic, liberal and early conceptualiser of alternative models to apartheid). All three were involved in developing, defending and sustaining liberal policies and values in South Africa from the late 19th century until the advent of democracy in 1994. The clarifications and contradictions within and between oral and written sources are examined, and individual cases are discussed in which they are highlighted. The research sources include family papers, official archives, publications and, crucially, oral testimony. The oral testimony includes formal and informal interviews. This study is a contribution to the history of a family, a university and a set of values. It covers a long period in South African history during which colonialism tightened into apartheid, resistance developed and the eventual vision of a democratic South Africa came to fruition.Contribution: The primary scientific contribution is the exploration of liberal policies and values in South African political and academic history through the prism of biography. Methodologically, the article discusses possible shortcomings with oral testimony when relied on as a sole source and examines how oral evidence can be utilised in conjunction with research based on archival and published sources to develop a fuller and more nuanced picture in biographical research.

The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa by Peter Kallaway

Reviewed by: The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa by Peter Kallaway Tiana Nowzari The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa. By Peter Kallaway. New York: Routledge, 2020. Peter Kallaway is a South African professor emeritus at the University of the Western Cape. He has published several works on education and society in Africa within a colonial context. His new book provides an extensive analysis of the authority figures that held power over policymaking and which knowledge prioritized over others. The Changing Face of Colonial Education in Africa offers a comprehensive and nuanced examination of colonial history in South Africa and its influences on educational policies during the last phase and formal end of colonialism. Although the research focuses on a South African context, the author applies the narrative to the general context of African history to illustrate infrequently explored topics of development and education in Africa. The research explains the process and evolution of educational reforms that have aimed to change perceived social and educational problems. More importantly, it describes the intent to reform African culture and way of life through a Eurocentric lens. This book provides extensive knowledge of colonial education in Africa and touches on sociological concepts of colonialism and postcolonialism. The author delivers a compelling description of African history based on scientific research and development. This book contributes to sociological research, particularly to colonial and postcolonial theories. These theories can be applied throughout the author's research as it underlines the main social and educational influences throughout the development of education in Africa. At the beginning of the book, Kallaway offers a broad social background of Western capitalist and imperialist goals that ultimately had an impact on the decisions made within policymaking in education. International organisations, such as the International Missionary Council, helped configure the initial objective of "civilising the natives" by westernising them. Based on Eurocentric ideologies, the aim was to assimilate South Africans into a Christian society. The main principle sought to create Christian Africans at school who could implement Christian values in everyday life. The book considers the socialisation process within schools through colonialism and displays the relevance of using education as an agent for social change. It further exhibits how education acted as a tool to propagate colonial discourses throughout other civilizations. African knowledge and customs were undervalued compared to the inclusion of Eurocentric and, primarily, white-led strategies. Kallaway's work thus offers a demonstration of how education served to shape a society influenced by Western culture. Kallaway's work provides historical examples that are important when compared to other sociological research and knowledge. He compares policymaking to other international events of assimilation and colonialism, such as Indian and African-American educational reform, that sought to create an emerging culture contingent on Christian values in South Africa. In other words, his book offers an insight into general colonial theories and practices that are a grander narrative of colonial and Eurocentric discourses imitated across continents that aimed to colonise societies. Policymakers used pre-existing knowledge and experiences from international and historical examples that designed the approach to sketching educational policies. His work issues a comprehensible conception of the social changes that would ultimately influence the developing goals and policies in education. The author produces an in-depth insight into the underlying problems stemming from the gap between education and greater African society. From a Eurocentric lens, educational policies excluded African culture and traditions. However, this book sheds light on the advocacy for the inclusion of African values and customs in the decision-making process of policy implementation. The removal of culture and tradition in education emphasised the separation of Africans from their Indigenous lifestyles and knowledge. It also fuelled the advocacy for the reclamation of culture with the argument that it would promote the reintegration of Africans into changing societies. The mission developed through the emergence and contribution of scientific research-based methodology. The importance of scientific methodology in policy development demonstrates a continuously changing phenomenon needing to evolve to produce promising results. It introduced a new way to assess policymaking and reconstructed methods that create academic institutions. Kallaway writes about a chronological timeline of the methodology that narrated South...

PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean

PLAN B, a Gathering of Strangers (or) This Is Not Working by Goldendean

Review: Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital

Review: <i>Architecture, State Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Apartheid Capital</i>