Post-1994 South Africa Research Articles

Contesting Migrancy: The Foreign Labor Debate in Post-1994 South Africa

In the minds of its victims and critics South African mine migrancy epitomized everything that was worst about capitalism and apartheid. The system and its associated institutions remain very much intact but do not look particularly comfortable in the new political and human rights–based dispensation of postapartheid South Africa. Historically the mines enjoyed privileged access to foreign labor a “right” denied by the state to most other employers. The continued exclusion of other employers from accessing similar rights has led perhaps inevitably to greatly increased usage of undocumented or “illegal” foreign labor by South African employers in other sectors. Logically the state has two options: open up the system to all or close it down once and for all. To date it has done neither as we show. This paper traces the postapartheid South African policy debate on regional migration and foreign contract labor to demonstrate how the mining industry has headed off any challenge to the status quo. The result is that the prospects for a fundamental transformation of the contract labor system remain as elusive as ever. (authors)

Imagining Immigration: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Policies in Post-1994 South Africa

Imagining Immigration: Inclusive Identities and Exclusive Policies in Post-1994 South Africa

Contesting Migrancy: The Foreign Labor Debate in Post-1994 South Africa

Contesting Migrancy: The Foreign Labor Debate in Post-1994 South Africa

Exploring the Aesthetics of Reconciliation: Rugby and the South African National Anthem

Turning to the great white South African ritual, rugby, this article probes the role of South Africa's national anthems in the elaborately staged and self-congratulatory global spectacle of the Rugby World Cup 1995 and the politics of nation building of which it became part. Following Roland Barthes' reading of Eisenstein film stills, the article ponders the meaning of the obtuse in the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup, which remains one of the most poignant and powerful moments in post-1994 South Africa. It dwells on the meaning of difference, which, in Rian Malan's tortured phrase, exists in South Africa as 'parallel kingdoms of consciousness'. Reading the singing of the South African national anthems during the opening ceremony of the 1995 Rugby World Cup allows the possibility of contrasting difference as an independent and regulative agent to moral difference, which paradoxically depends on an improbable degree of 'sameness' in all other categories, including the historical. Even if South Africans are not (yet) a nation, it is possible to explore what can at the very least be called an intuitive sense of interdependence. (SA J Musicology: 2001 21: 19-38)

THE IMPACT OF REGIONAL INTEGRATION ON SOUTHERN AFRICAN AGRICULTURE

Your Conference Organising Committee has done me a signal honour in asking me to deliver the Simon Brand Memorial Lecture. Indeed, I feel doubly honoured since Simon Brand was a personal friend of mine and someone whom I held in high esteem. He was a man of integrity, and this, together with his intellectual rigour, led to his being highly respected by all shades of political opinion. He played an important role in supporting socio-political change in South Africa, and I have no doubt that, but for his untimely death, he would have assumed an even more important role in the new South Africa post-1994. One of the fields in which he had become increasingly interested was that of economic cooperation across the Southern African region. As Simon Brand was an agricultural economist by training, I hope he would have approved of the topic which I have chosen to consider in this lecture.