Idea Of South Africa Research Articles

Nelson Mandela’s changing idea of South Africa

This article is a critical reflection on Nelson Mandela’s changing idea of South Africa as reflected in his widely known autobiography Long Walk to Freedom. It seeks to understand how he worked towards laying down a profound post-racial humanism based on a broader inclusive South African nationalism that transcended the narrow and exclusionist racial apartheid idea of South Africa. His autobiography is intertwined inextricably with the complex and ever-changing idea of South Africa. The formation of Mandela’s political consciousness from that of a rural Thembu boy in Eastern Cape, to an urban nationalist fire-brand in Johannesburg, a prisoner of conscience at Robben Island, a pragmatist and voice of reason during the Convention for South Africa Democracy (CODESA) negotiations, and right up to his one-term presidency (1994–1999) reflects the life of an active politician and an embodiment of the contested idea of South Africa. While Mandela never stopped seeking to understand the complex aspects of the contested idea of South Africa, his idea was also influenced by instances of mass action, the influence of friends, work and political colleagues, the ANC and his experiences during the 27 years of his imprisonment. Therefore, if his life of struggle embodied the complex and ever-changing idea of South Africa, it is not surprising that his political actions are blamed as the source of the present crisis engulfing the country. However, this article posits that South Africans who remained stuck in racial adversarial politics failed Mandela in his decolonial endeavour to set afoot a new humanism. Based on a platform that radically transcended the colonial/apartheid paradigm of difference, Mandela’s vision depended on a successful metamorphosis of the erstwhile ‘white/black’ dichotomy as an essential pre-requisite for the rebirth of a new political community.

Cultural Villages and Their Idea of South Africa: A Decolonial Critique

Cultural villages are currently one of the most popular tourism attractions in South Africa, but in spite of their popularity, the villages also face a barrage of criticisms leveled against the manner in which they represent culture and identity, as well as their political economy. Thus, the criticisms leveled against the cultural villages range from that they represent myths instead of culture to that they stage identity and culture in an essentialist and ahistorical manner as though culture is circumscribed and “frozen in time.” In the context of crafting a cohesive South African national identity, the question that arises in light of the above criticism leveled against the cultural villages is that of: To what extent does their representation of culture and identity contribute to the making of an inclusive and cohesive South African national identity? This question is important not only because cultural representations such as the cultural villages of South Africa serve as mirrors of how people imagine themselves and their relationship with others but also because such representation can neither negate nor enhance the idea of constructing a new identity. In this article, I examine both the negative and positive contributions of the cultural village project to the idea of an inclusive and cohesive South Africa. Thus, I deploy the case study of PheZulu Safari Park and Lesedi cultural villages to examine the extent to which the construction of cultural villages enhances and/or negates the idea of a cohesive national identity in South Africa.

Curriculum, knowledge, and the idea of South Africa

South Africa is an important social space in world history and politics for understanding how the modern world comes to deal with the questions of social difference, and the encounter of people with different civilizational histories. In this essay I argue that a particular racial idea inflected this encounter. One of the ways in which this happened was through the dominance of late nineteenthcentury and early twentieth-century positivism. In setting up the argument for this essay, I begin with a characterization of the nature of early South Africa's modernity, the period in which the country's political and intellectual leadership began to outline the kinds of knowledges they valued. I argue that a scientism, not unlike the positivism that emerges in many parts of the world at this time, came to inform discussions of progress and development in the country at the end of the nineteenth century. This was continued into the early twentieth century, and was evident in important interventions in the country such as the establishment of the higher education system and initiatives like the Carnegie Inquiry of 1933. The key effect of this scientism, based as it was on the conceits of objectivity and neutrality, was to institute suspicion of all other forms of knowing, and most critically that of indigenous knowledge. In the second part of the paper, I show that this scientism persists in the post-apartheid curriculum project. Finally, I make an exploratory argument, drawing on the concept of the 'transaction' in John Dewey, for a new approach to knowing.

Between the Kafkaesque and the Grotesque: The Monstrous Idea of South Africa in Fred Khumalo's Histriographic Metafiction

SummaryIn its insistence on the allegorical frame of South African transformations that attend the disfigured stature of a hero into a cauldron of Kafkaesque sterility and grotesque existence, this paper draws parallels between Gregor Samsa's bizarre hidden away condition and awkwardness of South Africa's insularity and exceptionalism. In arguing for an integrated idea of South Africa, on the basis of Mandela's pluriversalism, it offers a retrieval of South Africa's simultaneous worldliness and Africanness, further to provide a decolonial critique of what counts as a place called South Africa from an ontological perspective of what Lewis R. Gordon in the fashion of Frantz Fanon calls a zone of “being and non-being” (2005). However, it adds two further dimensions: the immanent conditions of becoming South Africa(n) and the drives that define the agency of attaining ontological totality for putative citizens and denizens in South Africa.