Justice In South Africa Research Articles

Dear Mr Sobukwe: examining Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe’s pan-African vision and how it has influenced youth movements in South Africa today

Pan-Africanism is experiencing a resurgence amongst young people in post-1994 South Africa. In this article, I explore how people across different generations interpret the legacy of a critical figure in South African history, Robert Mangaliso Sobukwe. The participants in this research and I represent a sliver in the changing interpretations of Sobukwe’s legacy in South Africa after 1994. I have chosen an epistolary form as the key organising framework to share my ethnographic research, mirroring Sobukwe’s own prolific letter writing practice throughout his life. The article presents letters written by two participants in my research to Sobukwe, followed by a response letter from me. This forms a dialogical conversation between me, the researcher, the participants in my research and Robert Sobukwe. The research essay contains elements of auto-ethnography, allowing me to engage closely with how Sobukwe has impacted my own thinking about justice in South Africa. I focus on education, a key tenet in Sobukwe’s pan-Africanist vision. The article shows the ongoing erasure of Black liberation fighters from contemporary South Africa and the impact of coloniality in education.

Latent potential? Searching for environmental justice in South African landscape architecture praxis

Landscape architecture is not formally affiliated with environmental justice in South Africa. This is concerning given that the country is the most socio-economically unequal worldwide and that local cities contain dire urban realities and climate-related risks with degraded and unsafe green open spaces. We explored the potential within local professional praxis for addressing inequities related to green open spaces in the urban environment. Narratives were collected via 25 in-depth interviews from a diverse sample. We found that though landscape architects have yet to be exposed to ‘environmental justice’ as a term and as a movement, practitioners have an implicit awareness of environmental inequity as a lived reality. We argue that these professionals have the potential to actively promote environmental justice, evidenced by how practitioners currently address justice concerns and challenges. We call for more active and authentic engagement around environmental justice within the profession here and internationally.

Initial Teacher Education for Social Justice in South Africa: A Higher Education Policy Perspective

The Constitution of the Republic of South Africa envisions a socially just society where all citizens enjoy fundamental human rights. Education is regarded as significant in realizing social justice (SJ). Hence, South African education policy is underpinned by the conviction that teachers are drivers of societal change and instrumental in creating a socially just society. It is therefore expected that initial teacher education (ITE) programs to train prospective teachers will be infused with knowledge, competencies, values and attitudes to develop the dispositions that would facilitate social justice in a democratic and open South African society. In this desk-top study, we investigate the attributes and competencies promoted and advanced through the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications Policy (MRTEQ) (2015) concerning the training of prospective South African teachers for the realization of social justice. We gathered our data through a literature review and a policy analysis, and we drew from critical social theory (CST), which argues for social transformation, human emancipation, and capacitation to make sense of our findings. We found that the MRTEQ (2015) promotes and advances knowledge, contextual awareness, and critical pedagogy as significant attributes and competencies for realizing social justice through education and, more specifically, ITE. The implication is that all initial teacher programmes must be designed to equip prospective teachers with these attributes to contribute to realizing social justice and transforming society. Against this backdrop, specific recommendations are made to develop these attributes in prospective teachers.

Exploring the conflicting ideals of ecological modernisation and environmental justice in South Africa: Evidence from the 2020 National Waste Management Strategy

ABSTRACT This article explores the impact of the shift towards neoliberalism on environmental management in post-1994 South Africa. The adoption of ecological modernisation as a policy strategy for sustainable development is examined, focusing on the reliance on market mechanisms. However, a lack of balance between the environment, society, and the economy is observed, as socio-economic and environmental concerns are often compromised for economic growth concerns. The resulting technocratic and bureaucratic approach to environmental governance is thus disconnected from the realities on the ground, indicating weak ecological modernisation. This study specifically assesses the implementation of ecological modernisation in waste management initiatives and emphasises the importance of policy implementation. The findings underscore the need for greater attention to policy imperatives to achieve a more effective, just and sustainable approach to waste management in South Africa.

Settler colonialism and therapeutic discourses on the past: a response to Burnett et al.’s ‘a politics of reminding’

ABSTRACT In ‘A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district’, Burnett et al. scrutinize the memory activism of the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council, which is part of the wider ‘Khoisan resurgence’ sweeping across post-apartheid South Africa. Although the authors missed important nuances, they also pointed out flaws in the way I used Niezen’s ‘therapeutic history’ [Niezen, R. (2009). The rediscovered self: Indigenous identity and cultural justice. McGill-Queen’s Press] in my work to account for why Khoisan activists turn to the past. I therefore not only respond to their criticism, but also revise aspects of my theoretical framework. Therapeutic history is not divorced from material concerns. Nor is it representative of all engagements with the past by indigenous people or simply the opposite of academic history. Instead, by drawing on my ethnographic fieldwork and theorizing alongside the Khoisan, I show how it captures emic discourses on the past that entangle notions of indigenous identity, healing, and history in order to resist settler colonialism and its oppressive etic histories. While the concept of therapeutic history has its limitations, it effectively highlights indigenous people’s agency in the face of settler colonialism in South Africa and elsewhere.

Contents of a transformative developmental social work curriculum

ABSTRACT South Africa is recognized as the most unequal society in the world. In the National Development Plan 2030 in 2012 the South African government has called on social workers to participate in transformation by addressing inequality. A pursuit of social justice highlights the need for a social work curriculum that is transformative in nature and cultivates an anti-colonial Global South approach. Transformative developmental social work based on social development theory is a modality of choice when it comes to practicing social work in Global South countries. It empowers social workers to contribute to social justice in societies that are plagued by inequality. Although South Africa has incorporated developmental social work into its social welfare policies, a knowledge gap still exists that hampers social workers in bridging the gap between theoretical training and practicing in Global South countries. It is, therefore, necessary for South Africa to develop social development training, and practice which answers to its own socio-political, cultural, and economic environment. To reach this objective, a curriculum is crucial in which social justice, human rights, and equality are pursued. The aim of the study was to develop a curriculum for undergraduate social work training in transformative developmental social work to enable social workers to contribute to social justice. A multi-method and multi-phased study approach were used for the purpose of curriculum and programme development. In phase one, a scoping review was done about current social development teaching in the Global South. During phase two, a quantitative cross-sectional study with newly graduated social workers was done. They completed the Social Justice Scales of Torres-Harding et al. Phase three was a qualitative descriptive study with young South Africans that were used to describe their experience of social justice in South Africa. These phases were used to gather information to guide the process of curriculum development. Curriculum contents were then verified using the Delphi Technique by social work teaching experts. The research study produced a curriculum for transformative developmental social work training for undergraduate social work students.

Does mob justice fit the conceptual theory of justice?

With the recent surge of mob justice in South Africa, this paper investigates whether recourse to mob justice serves a legitimate purpose and especially whether it serves justice or falls within the conceptual meaning of justice. In so doing, the paper undertook a literature review in view first to identify the possible causes of mob justice and whether or not mob justice serves a legitimate purpose in society. The literature reveals that mob justice aims to ensure security and maintain social order due to state inefficiency to provide security to its citizens. Mob justice becomes a mechanism of social control, policing, and society’s expression that the criminal justice system has failed. However, the paper could not find any related literature on the question whether mob justice falls within the philosophical concept of justice. It finds that the current discourse on mob justice literature focuses on the social and economic aspects of mob justice, delving into the possible reasons behind the attacks, or the legal aspects of mob justice. The paper is therefore relevant as its objective is to determine whether mob justice meets the conceptual meaning of justice and if there is a place for such conduct within a constitutional society. The paper found that mob justice falls short of the philosophical understanding of justice and is no more than injustice. It recommends a policy shift in the form of community involvement in policing.

Impediments during the compilation of a search and seizure warrant for digital information by forensic investigators in South Africa

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to identify and discuss impediments in the compilation of an application for a search and seizure warrant for digital evidence and the structure of such a warrant in South African criminal cases. Design/methodology/approach This paper provides a brief overview of international and local impediments, followed by a detailed discussion of the implications of these impediments and how it is approached in various jurisdictions. The methodology of this paper consists of a literature review. Findings Addressing the impediments in the compilation of the application and the warrant will be beneficial for forensic investigators, the South African Police Service (SAPS) and the administration of justice in South Africa. Research limitations/implications Search and seizures for digital evidence form part of civil, regulatory and criminal search and seizures. This study focuses on the search and seizure of digital evidence in criminal matters pursuant to mainly the provisions of the Criminal Procedure Act 51 of 1977 and the Cybercrimes Act 19 of 2020. Originality/value The originality of this paper lies in the approach to the drafting of applications for search and seizure warrants for digital information in South Africa. The contribution of the study is that, by using this approach, the SAPS can address the impediments during the application and compilation of the warrants, which would enhance the quality of investigations and contribute to the successful investigation and prosecution of crime in South Africa.

To kneel or not to kneel: Appropriating a religious and sport symbol for racial justice in South Africa

The act of kneeling of the Black Lives Matter Movement (BLM) has its origin in both the religious and the sport environment. In some religious circles it is believed that kneeling is a form of submission to God and in other circles it is a symbol of resistance to oppressive and dehumanising practices and structures. This article intends to investigate critically the use of the symbolism of kneeling, its socio-political and religious implications, how it is appropriated to address racism and other inequalities in sport, and how it can become a symbol in the process of achieving racial justice. The purposeof the study is to investigate whether the BLM concept of taking the knee (as well as the related expression “I can’t breathe”) and its ambiguous interpretation can be appropriated in the South African context and whether it can assist the struggle to achieve racial justice in South Africa. The study will follow a multidisciplinary approach and will utilise comparative literature analysis.

Thinking Capital and Colonialism in South Africa : The Problem of Justice

Abstract Notwithstanding the epistemological problems with the dominant appreciations of human rights, the problem with dominant ways of understanding justice for colonial repression post colonialism is that they misplace the logic whence the repression stems. In this paper I propose a revisiting of the historical materialist approach to justice, as a way to strengthen the scholarship on justice in South Africa. I essentially deal with two contending arguments on the debate on justice in South Africa, namely transformative constitutionalism, the position of constitutional romantics, and Azanian political thought, propounded by what are termed constitutional abolitionists in this paper. Moreover, using Bernard Magubane's critical socio-historical explanation of South Africa and Evgeny Pashukanis' legal theory of Marxism, I offer a third way which opens up some of the theoretical deficiencies of transformative constitutionalism as it pertains to South Africa. Ultimately, in this paper, I attempt to move from a descriptive and ideological appreciation of justice, to a conception of justice rooted in the materiality of social relations.

Practical Theology and Social Just Pedagogies as Decoloniality Space

Higher education institutions in South Africa are still dominated by colonial traditions, course content, staff with colonial privileges and attachments, and discriminatory structures and systems. Practical theology and theologians are no exception. This article seeks to investigate the correlations between social just pedagogies and social justice. Social just pedagogies consider the role of the students, lecturers, and non-human phenomena as contributing to epistemology and agency formation. Normative pedagogies remain important criteria for knowledge production and graduate attributes within the South African higher education landscape. Within practical theology, the pedagogies that are used to form students and impart knowledge are still dominated by classical teaching methods that are power-centred and biased towards the privileged. The aim of this article is thus not to replace the normative pedagogies but to challenge the normativity and essentialism that has characterised colonial, race-related, and top-down knowledge production. I will introduce a social just pedagogy of teaching practical theology that critically engages and challenges the privileged normative position of classical practical theology. A social just pedagogy will bring the centre of learning and teaching into the structure of the lecture room, a participatory method of knowledge production, students, and the lecturers. The hierarchical structure of the South African university system will be engaged with as an instrument of traditional classical knowledge production systems. Teaching practical theology through social just pedagogies will also contribute to social justice within democratic South Africa. The question that I will address is how teaching practical theology at higher education institutions can contribute to the agency of social justice in South Africa.

Environmental justice in South Africa: the dilemma of informal settlement residents

The concept of environmental justice is well established in the literature; however, scholars still battle to agree on what it really means. This concept has become more relevant to the studies of informal settlements amongst others. The location and environmental variables in informal settlements suggests a variety of injustices that comes with location, limited access to water, poor or lack of sanitation, challenges with transport availability, accessibility, affordability, and lack of other social amenities. These and many other socio-economic needs forms part of the value chain of environmental justice debates across the world. This paper deals with environmental justice in the informal settlements of Kosmos, in the Madibeng Local Municipality, Bojanala Region in the North-West Province of South Africa. The paper highlights some of the environmental challenges faced by the informal settlement residents such as pollution, waste management (landfill sites, waste collection) sanitation and water provision. The paper explores how the Kosmos informal settlement community has been excluded from decision making processes regarding their own environment and considers the levels of environmental injustices commonly associated with this kind of practice.

Using health information for community activism: A case study of the movement for change and social justice in South Africa.

The access to, use, and exchange of health information is crucial when strengthening public health services and improving access to care. However, many health system stakeholders, including community groups are perpetually excluded from accessing and using health information. This is problematic as community groups, themselves end-users of care, are well-positioned to keep the health system accountable, provide feedback on the quality of services, and identify emerging health concerns. Using qualitative, ethnographic methods, this paper investigates different strategies used by the Movement for Change and Social Justice (MCSJ)-a local health activism group-to collect, use and distribute health information to improve health care in Gugulethu, a low-income neighbourhood in Cape Town, South Africa. Through participant observation, shadowing, informal conversations and semi-structured interviews that were analysed using iterative thematic analysis, findings revealed that MCSJ effectively collected, used and exchanged health information to develop short-term health campaigns. To get access to the needed health information, they used innovative strategies, including cultivating allies in the health system, finding safe spaces, and using community brokers to effectively mobilise community members to keep the health system accountable. MCSJ's strategies highlight that stakeholders' engagement with health information is not only a technical exercise, but a complex social process that requires constant negotiation and relationship building. Therefore, to make meaningful improvements to health services and create adaptive and responsive health systems, we need to include community groups as active stakeholders in the health system, provide relevant, up-to-date and locally relevant health information, and facilitate opportunities to socially engage with health information and those who produce it.

JUVENILE DIVERSION: DEVELOPMENTS IN SOUTH AFRICA AND THE NETHERLANDS

Juvenile justice in South Africa has undergone many changes in the last twenty years. However, in our opinion, one of the most important developments in South African juvenile justice in this period has been the idea of diverting the trials of young offenders away from criminal courts to appropriate alternative programs (Sloth-Nielsen “Reviewing the Prosecutorial Decision not to Divert – Case Discussion of M v The Senior Public Prosecutor, Randburg” 2001 De Jure 194). This development is the result of a number of events, amongst which are South Africa’s adoption of the United Nations Children’s Convention (United Nations Convention on theRights of the Child (1989)), and the inclusion of children’s rights in the South African Constitution in 1996. Juvenile diversion is an international trend. This note will highlight some of the local developments and will also illustrate some interesting similar developments in juvenile diversion in the Netherlands.

A politics of reminding: Khoisan resurgence and environmental justice in South Africa’s Sarah Baartman district

ABSTRACT In the wake of colonial fragmentation and genocide, Indigenous ‘Khoisan resurgence’ movements in South Africa have mobilised subversive forms of authenticity, including heteroglossic and inventive translanguaging from fragments of Khoekhoegowab. In our analysis of video ethnographic texts produced in collaboration with the Gamtkwa Khoisan Council (GKC) in Hankey, the birthplace of Sarah Baartman, we explore how memory, language politics, and environmental activism are interwoven in acts of linguistic citizenship that constitute the ‘rememorying’ of a history that has remained persistently obscured. We argue that rememorying advances a politics of reminding which counters the Rainbow Nation’s institutionalised politics of forgetting, as well as anthropological accounts that consider Indigenous activist invocations of history as merely ‘therapeutic’. Through an engagement with the memory activism of the GKC, we identify how reconstructing word-histories, reliving historical traumas, retelling histories of sites of memory, seeing oneself mirrored in one’s ancestors, and the nexus of land, memory, and time form the basis for shared meaning-making, bringing impetus, focus, and intergenerational continuity to struggles for environmental and land justice.

The Anticipation of #MeToo in J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace

In this article, I reconsider J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace, often interpreted in the context of South Africa’s transition to post apartheid life and with an eye to the nation’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, by instead reading it in light of the international twenty first century MeToo movement. I contend that, in retrospect, Disgrace both demonstrates affinities with MeToo and proleptically envisions, from the postcolonial periphery, the contours of the movement decades before its forceful emergence as a watershed moment in the West. Disgrace tells a story echoed in many MeToo accounts, depicting the public exposure and fall from grace of a privileged white man following his sexual exploitation of a non white student. My interests lie not in the matter of David Lurie’s potential redemption; rather, I explore Coetzee’s exposure of the persistence of institutionalized gendered and racial privileges through moments of historical transformation. I argue that Disgrace’s highlighting of its own unnarrated perspectives anticipates the forceful challenge to a lingering white heterosexual hegemony that characterizes MeToo, while at the same time exposing the perpetual marginalization of non white and non Western traumas in discourses of transitional justice in South Africa and globally.

Divergent desires for the just transition in South Africa: An assemblage analysis

In this paper I establish a ‘just transition assemblage’ as a theoretical and empirical case-study to explore the plurality of justice in South Africa's energy transition. The coal phase-out is complicated by the legacies of apartheid, poverty, inequality, unemployment and structural crisis in the state-owned power utility. This transition is loaded with expectation but there is no consensus on what would qualify it as ‘just’. This assemblage analysis clusters desires around two distinct post-carbon imaginaries. The first is an ordering of desires for justice in a diffuse, distributional sense, targeting greenhouse gas emission reductions and looking to smooth the negative impacts of the transition. I label this approach ‘net justice’. This targets more justice overall in defined political spaces, and contrasts with the second orientation around recognising, reconciling, and addressing specific injustices. These desires are distinguished by a contrasting purpose of renewable energy and differing attitudes to its appropriateness or fit. There are incoherent spatial effects, where net justice is shown to be a territorialising project whilst specific injustices need to be de-territorialised. Emphasising desire shows how material and history are enrolled and enlivened, contributing to post-carbon imaginaries. This approach enables injustice and net justice to be understood as conceptually distinct, despite seeming unified calls for a just transition. The primary contribution of this paper is to show how in some cases, popular uses of the terms justice and injustice refer to different things. It forces attention on the question of: ‘justice for whom?’

Exploring the Realities of Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of the Case of Rural Learners’ Transition to Higher Institutions

Exploring the Realities of Social Justice in South Africa: A Review of the Case of Rural Learners’ Transition to Higher Institutions

A Future of Justice Inclusion: Examining Access to Justice in South Africa through the ‘Ethic of Care’ and ‘Complexity’

Abstract In South Africa, a number of obstructions exist to realising the right to access to justice as enshrined by section 34 of the South African constitution. Globally, many countries grapple with access to justice due to a number of multi-layered and complex causes. This article explores traces, connections, definitions and perceptions related to access to justice so as to allow for a deeper understanding of persisting justice problems. It employs a multi-disciplinary approach that examines worldviews on access to justice in South Africa through the lens of what Sohail Inayatullah terms ‘other ways of knowing’. These worldviews are also considered through the framework of the ‘ethic of care’ as formulated by Carol Gilligan and connected to the notion of ‘complexity’ as understood by Yvonne Malan and Paul Cilliers. The worldviews explored represent ‘different voices’ that discloses a possibility for a future of justice inclusion. The article calls for a people-centred approach to access of justice, underpinned by notions of humility, complexity, concreteness, and particularity.

The Gendered Impact of COVID-19 Directives on Access to Criminal Justice in South Africa

Gender-based violence (GBV) knows no boundaries, and no region has been immune to this scourge. In the South African context, GBV had reached pandemic levels long before the COVID-19 virus. With the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resultant lockdown measures adopted in response to it, cases of GBV rose steeply. The pandemic also saw major criminal justice players in South Africa, including the South African Police Service, the National Prosecuting Authority, the judiciary, and Correctional Services, adopt directives to regulate criminal justice during the lockdown periods. The directives took the form of general directives, arguably having no implications for women’s right to access to criminal justice. In this article, I examine selected directives by criminal justice players with a focus on those issued by the judiciary. I assess whether these directives could have been gendered, thus negatively impacting women’s access to criminal justice during the COVID-19 pandemic. I conduct this analysis using the concept of intersectionality, which underscores that the social categorisation of an individual, such as gender, race, nationality, and class can sometimes overlap or compound, thus causing disadvantage or discrimination. Based on this analysis, I conclude that some of these directives were gendered and could have exacerbated the challenge of access to justice by survivors of GBV. This conclusion seeks to confirm the view that seemingly gender-neutral directives and regulations may in fact contain gendered elements.