Politics In South Africa Research Articles

Book Review: Electoral Politics in South Africa: Assessing the First Democratic Decade

Book Review: Electoral Politics in South Africa: Assessing the First Democratic Decade

New Writings on Islam and Muslim Politics in South Africa

New Writings on Islam and Muslim Politics in South Africa

From his master's voice and back again? Presidential inaugurations and South African television - the post-apartheid experience

This article examines the SABC television news coverage of the three presidential inaugurations in post-apartheid South Africa (Mandela 1994, Mbeki 1999 and 2004). The main question addressed is how the nation-building process and the broadcaster's relationship to government are reflected in the national television news. The news stories reporting the same national socio-political event at three different stages constitute a case through which to analyse the changing discourses of nation building. The aim of the article is to speak to discussions about nationhood, presidency, and politics in South Africa. The findings have a direct bearing on debates about the establishment and enhancement of democracy and nation building in contemporary South Africa, and emphasize how a serious reassertion of media control took place towards the end of the first decade of democracy.

South Africa's democracy: from celebration to crisis

This essay is based on a reading of a selection of texts that have been published around the tenth anniversary of South Africa's much celebrated democratic election of 1994, though not necessarily for that purpose. It focuses mainly on political commentaries which have appeared since 2002 in various anthologies, journal articles, magazines and newspapers at a time when the excitement and euphoria had died down and the African National Congress (ANC) government faced an assessment of its first two terms in power, and growing problems during its third. South Africans across the board have begun to take stock of the progress (or lack of it) made in the country since the transition to majority rule. Between 2005 and 2008 journalists, sociologists, economists, political scientists and others, including rank‐and‐file members of the governing Alliance partners (ANC, South African Communist Party [SACP] and the Congress of South African Trade Unions [COSATU]), have taken a strident tone. The essay also visits central features of current politics in South Africa, discussing media and other reaction to Jacob Zuma's powerful political claim to the presidency, his cultivation of the image of popular champion of the oppressed and his capitalization on growing resentment against Thabo Mbeki's authoritarian ‘top‐down’ style of governance. It examines the increasingly negative interpretations of the ANC government's performance in key areas, especially health, land policy, restitution for apartheid human rights' abuses recorded by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC), and the economy. The review does not pretend to be comprehensive, but reflects some of the more robust critique that now challenges earlier valorizations of the achievements of 1994, which pitched apartheid against democracy and praised the Mandela era.

The Conundrums of Language Policy and Politics in South Africa and Zimbabwe

This article reflects on and reinterprets South Africa's documented human rights-inspired language policy and Zimbabwe's assimilation–tolerance approach to language use. The overall intention is to expose and discuss the intolerant, undemocratic and homogenizing ideologies underpinning language policy in the two neighbouring southern African countries. The article spotlights the ceremonial ‘official language’ status of South Africa's nine African languages and the ‘national language’ status of the Ndebele language in Zimbabwe. It is argued that contrary to rosy policy enunciations, actual patterns of language use and discursive practices of ruling political elites confer higher functional status to English and Afrikaans in South Africa and English and Shona in Zimbabwe. Therefore, as well as being firmly located and resident in political statements of the ruling elites, language policy ideologies are also hidden in the fissures and faultlines of official documents. The article concludes that the documented language policies of South Africa and Zimbabwe epitomize lofty ideals that are not consonant with actual patterns of language use mediated and legitimized by hegemonic discourses of ruling politicians.

The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century - By Jennfier Beningfield

The Frightened Land: Land, Landscape and Politics in South Africa in the Twentieth Century - By Jennfier Beningfield

Black republican tradition, nativism and populist politics in South Africa

The formation of the Native Club in 2006 provoked widespread debate across South African society as it was deemed to be heralding black reverse racism in a country that had only recently emerged from the violent and exclusivist system of apartheid. The Native Club was interpreted as a threat to the spirit of ‘rainbowism’ and to current efforts at forging common citizenship for whites and blacks. The main weakness of the current debates on the Native Club and the phenomenon of nativism is the relative absence of historicisation and contextualisation within broader issues – in particular antinomies in black liberation thought and historical populist imaginations of citizenship and the nation. This article seeks to historicise and contextualise the Native Club and the phenomenon of nativism within the broader politics of contested conceptualisations of the national question and contested definitions of the teleology of the liberation struggle, as well as differing imaginations of the nation and visions of citizenship and democracy. It is only through a grounded and nuanced historical approach that the logic and the dangers of nativism could be understood together with the resurgence of populist politics crystallising around Jacob Zuma and the broader succession debate currently enveloping South Africa.

Land‐Reform Politics in South Africa's Countryside

The post‐1994 South African government introduced a land reform in order to address racial land inequalities inherited from colonial rule and apartheid. White settlers appropriated more than 90 per...

Policy networks in recalibrated political terrain: the case of school curriculum policy and politics in South Africa

School curriculum policy and politics in South Africa are discussed in this article as a means of highlighting the nature of Governmental power and functioning in a post‐liberation developing country. The notion ‘policy networks’ is used as a lens to understand the ways in which specific constellations of policy interests informed the consecutive policy cycles that led to the curriculum policy trajectory. The article is based on a series of interviews with key policy participants. The two consecutive policy networks that dominated the policy processes established their influence relative to the recalibrated structural and discursive terrain of the 1990s. The article discusses the processes that led to the school curriculum policy that was authorized in 1997, as well as the basis upon which it was displaced by a policy review process during 2000. Key to understanding network functioning and displacement in these processes is the specific epistemic basis upon which the networks acquired and established their dominance.

Electoral politics in South Africa: assessing the first democratic decade

Electoral politics in South Africa: assessing the first democratic decade

Can it start small, but end big? expanding social assistance in South Africa

Generating heated politics in South Africa is a proposal to introduce a universal basic income grant, known as “BIG”. The “gaps” in the existing system of social assistance grants have caught the attention of activists and politicians across the political spectrum. Most concur on the need to expand the system, but the issue of how its “gaps” should be closed is a matter of great political divergence. To cast light on the significance of these debates, I show how the system's “gaps” are more complicated than measurements of poverty and inequality may suggest. Following the social and economic relations that develop around social grants, my analysis foregrounds a tension in the existing assistance system. Social grants provide a critical source of income for recipients and their kin, assisting them to confront the challenging realities of current labor market conditions. At the same time, social grants act as conduits for historical forces to articulate with local conditions and reshape relationships between citizens, the state, and the market. This tension points to the ambiguity of the BIG proposal and of its potential to engender a larger transformation.

Youth and identity politics in South Africa, 1990-1994

Youth and identity politics in South Africa, 1990-1994

Post-apartheid Public Art in Cape Town: Symbolic Reparations and Public Space

This essay considers public art practice in post- apartheid Cape Town within the notion of symbolic reparations-a concept deriving out of South Africa's Trust Reconciliation Commission. The paper situates developments in public arts practice in the context of developments in cultural politics in South Africa and globally. More especially, it discusses new genre arts projects, which focus on a range of issues related to identity, space and place. The projects-the District Six Museum, District Six Sculpture Project, PTO, Y30, BLAC, Returning the Gaze, and the In Touch Poetry Bus Tour-focus on issues such as rethinking monuments, the memorialising of 'hidden histories', engagements with racism and the abuse of power, and the reimagining of the city. The paper asks how these contemporary and often ephemeral projects, critically engage with issues of history, geography, memory and transformation and, in so doing, mark the landscape of Cape Town, making spaces for dialogue and/or standing as poetic symbols and challenges to the inequalities of the city.

Sibusisiwe Nombuso Dlamini. Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa 1990–1994. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xi + 231 pp. Chronology of Historical Developments. Glossary. Notes. References. Index. $55.00. Cloth.

Sibusisiwe Nombuso Dlamini. Youth and Identity Politics in South Africa 1990–1994. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005. xi + 231 pp. Chronology of Historical Developments. Glossary. Notes. References. Index. $55.00. Cloth. - Volume 48 Issue 3

The Trades Union Congress and Apartheid, 1948–1970

This article draws largely on hitherto unexplored primary source material in the TUC Archive at Warwick University. It examines the reaction of the British Trades Union Congress to the politics of South Africa during the first two decades of apartheid. Three aspects of policy are considered. The first is the relationship of the TUC to the divided South African trade union movement, split fundamentally over the treatment of African unionists. Here the TUC attempted to steer a middle course between the extremes of white racism and African radicalism, after an unsuccessful bid to foster labour unity. The second is the attitude of the TUC to the funds established to aid the defence in the Treason Trial of 1958–61 and the Rivonia Trial of 1963–64. This brought it into a sometimes difficult partnership with the London-based fund headed by Canon John Collins and the Johannesburg fund first run by Bishop Ambrose Reeves. The third is the TUC response to the call for a British boycott of South African trade and then for economic sanctions against South Africa, culminating in this period with the cancellation of the South African cricket tour of 1970. A short conclusion seeks to explain why the TUC was so cautious in its approach to South Africa on all three fronts.

Soweto blues: jazz, popular music, and politics in South Africa

Introduction Chapter 1: Where it All Started Chapter 2: New Sounds of the Cities Chapter 3: Athens on the Reef Chapter 4: The Land is Dead Chapter 5: Underground in Africa Chapter 6: Jazz for the Struggle, and the Struggle for Jazz Chapter 7: Home Is Where the Music Is: South African Jazz Abroad Chapter 8: The 1990s and Beyond: Not Yet Uhuru Appendix: Interviewees and Recordings Glossary Bibliography Index.

The African National Congress, the print media and the development of mediated politics in South Africa

Modern politics are largely mediated politics, experienced by the great majority of citizens at one remove, through their print and broadcast media of choice. Any study of democracy in contemporary conditions is therefore also a study of how the media report and interpret political events and issues McNair Journalism and Democracy This article shares in broad terms the global assumptions summarised by Brian McNair in this epigraph. However, it is mindful of the need, recognised by a recent text on ‘de-Westernising’ media studies, for a ‘contingent and variable understanding of the place of the media in society’ and for ‘a greater sense of difference and variability than is usually registered in media theory’ (Curran and Myung-Jin Park 2000, 15). It is in this spirit that the article tries to apply insights about mediated politics to contemporary South Africa. More specifically, it is guided by curiosity about the collision between national political systems and cultures, and various universalising forces in political values and ideology, as well as in the technology and political economy of the media. It is commonplace now to recognise, across the whole range of news and entertainment in the media, that globalisation is not all one-way traffic (Curran and Myung-Jin Park 2000, 7–8). Similarly, despite global trends in political communication that have been labelled Americanisation (Negrine 1996), national political cultures can be resilient and stubborn in the way they accept, adapt or reject the processes of mediated politics.

Peter Alexander. Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and Politics in South Africa, 1939–48. Athens: Ohio University Press and Oxford: James Currey. Cape Town: David Philip. 2000. Pp. 214. Cloth $44.95, paper $22.95

Peter Alexander. <italic>Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and Politics in South Africa, 1939–48</italic>. Athens: Ohio University Press and Oxford: James Currey. Cape Town: David Philip. 2000. Pp. 214. Cloth $44.95, paper $22.95

Reviews of Books:Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and Politics in South Africa, 1939-48 Peter Alexander

Reviews of Books:Workers, War and the Origins of Apartheid: Labour and Politics in South Africa, 1939-48 Peter Alexander

Book Review: Security and Politics in South Africa: The regional dimension

Book Review: Security and Politics in South Africa: The regional dimension