Post-apartheid Society Research Articles

WHY NOT POSTCOLONIAL BIBLICAL CRITICISM IN (SOUTH) AFRICA: STATING THE OBVIOUS OR LOOKING FOR THE IMPOSSIBLE?

During the last five decades of the 20th century, the African continent has systematically rid itself of the direct control of the colonial powers. Yet in (South) Africa and elsewhere on the continent, there has until now been very few attempts to introduce postcolonial biblical criticism as a credible hermeneutical approach for the subcontinent. In the South African theological context with its two dominant theological approaches, African and Black Theology, a variety of hermeneutical approaches is represented across a wide spectrum. However, the traditional approaches has until now largely carried the day, both in hermeneutical positioning and its application to and use for interpreting biblical texts. This is certainly true of the wider, popular and ecclesial arena where the Bible is used, but is also the case in the academy. Postcolonial criticism has not been seized upon as a productive method for reading and interpreting the Bible, although its use has obvious benefits also within South Africa’s post-Apartheid society. Postcolonial biblical criticism is nevertheless eminently suitable for a context characterised by the lingering colonial legacy, the continuous threat of neo-colonialism, and the position of displaced persons and refugees. This article considers possible reasons for the failure of postcolonial criticism to impact upon biblical studies in (South) Africa on a large scale, when it offers such obvious hermeneutical potential, spin-offs, as well as the opportunity to approach the Bible from a different than the traditional vantage point.

Desire, Misogyny, and Official Power in Mark Dornford-May's U-Carmen eKhayelitsha

As the most frequently adapted narrative in film history, the story Carmen – based originally on Proper Mérimée’s 1845 novella and George Bizet’s 1875 opera of the same name – offers differing response to various intertextual debates concerning feminism, sexual freedom, interracial relations, high versus low art, and urbanism versus ruralism. This paper situates a recent Xhosa language, cinematic adaptation of the Opera, Mark Dornford-May’s U-Carmen e-Khayelitsha (2005), in response to these various cultural critical debates, while invoking previous critical discussions of American Carmen adaptations, by Charles Vidor and Otto Preminger respectively, as templates for furhter analysis. I argue that Dornford-May’s film offers a self-reflexive, and indeed progressive, response to the Carmen narrative’s contradictory ideological stance on issues of female sexual empowernment and misogny. U-Carmen also downplays the themes of interracial romance and rural nostalgia present in previous Carmen adaptations, so as to hone in on the various intra-township dynamics at work within the Khayelitsha communiy that the film depcitrs. U-Carmen offers a cynical depiction of the post-apartheid township society in which romantic and sexual freedom are presumed to be at odds with the forces of official power. When placed within the context of the post-apartheid Khayelitsha mileau, the failure of Carmen’s rebellious, anti-authoritarian, and romantic disposition comes to symbolize the unfullfilled promises of the post-apartheid era.

Opportunity and Anxiety in the Post-Apartheid Society: The South African Novel Since 1990

Opportunity and Anxiety in the Post-Apartheid Society: The South African Novel Since 1990

Looking backward, looking forward: race, corrective measures and the South African Constitutional Court

The Constitutional Court has dealt with racially based corrective measures against the background of the Court’s understanding of South Africa’s apartheid past and the lingering effects and consequences of this past on post-apartheid society. While the Court has not always demonstrated a sufficient degree of care when deploying racial categories, its jurisprudence also gestures at the need for a contingent and critical approach to race when engaging with the problem of race-based corrective measures. The Constitutional Court’s jurisprudence on constitutionally permissible (or required) race-based corrective measures is discussed and I point out that the way the Court deals with this question opens up space for a constructive engagement with legally mandated race-based corrective measures to avoid some of the pitfalls highlighted in the article.

Opportunity and Anxiety in the Post-Apartheid Society: The South African Novel Since 1990

Opportunity and Anxiety in the Post-Apartheid Society: The South African Novel Since 1990

“Our Spirit Has No Boundary”: White Sangomas and Mediation in Cape Town

SUMMARY Fifteen years after apartheid, South African urban spaces remain segregated. Nevertheless, with people mixing more freely, social change has been inevitable. Mediation occurs on all levels of society. Some whites have even become sangomas, traditional African healers, performing rituals in black townships, creating heterotopic reversals of Cape Town's urban spaces. This article examines the many ways in which white sangomas mediate across the boundaries of kinship and race in postapartheid society. I propose the concept of “mediatory space” with regard to the ritual spaces where these crossovers occur.

A Participatory Approach to Healing and Transformation in South Africa

In this article I describe my personal journey from working as private practitioner to participating in the wider South African society. Post-apartheid South African society struggles with overwhelming problems related to poverty, illness, violence, sexism, and racism. Moreover, in those communities where the trauma is most severe, professional resources are scarce. I propose a participatory approach which invites therapists to respond to these socio-economic and political challenges and the problems that arise from them by thinking and acting outside the constraints of their consultation rooms and of traditional therapeutic conversations, into active participation in ways that might support healing and social transformation. I use two examples to illustrate and discuss the participatory approach with which I have engaged for over 10 years. The illustrative examples show how a participatory approach can create ripples that impact communities in healing and transformative ways.

History and its racial legacies: quotas in South African rugby and cricket

South African identity has always been shaped by racial quotas; that is, divisions, assignments, allowances and allocations based on socially created ideas of race and difference. Both law and custom assigned a hierarchy which separated the rulers from the ruled, and allocated and rationed goods, services and enjoyments in all spheres of life, including sport. ‘Superior’ whites were layered above the Cape coloured people, followed by the Indian community and, lastly, the Africans, the black majority. This article looks briefly at the historical context of racial divisions and, with the downfall of apartheid, the rhetoric of an avowedly de-racialized ‘new South Africa’. Given the chronic history of negative discrimination, it is understandable that affirmative action has become a major policy framework in the building of a post-apartheid society. But sport is a sobering example of how a domain can be ‘re-racialized’ in this quest. How does the African National Congress justify the (re)introduction into sport of a proportional or numerical quota system based on racial categories? Is there a need for demographic representativeness in white-dominated sports like cricket and rugby, but seemingly not in black-dominated soccer? Is an arithmetic quota system not merely a logical extension of the reviled racial genres and divides of previous centuries?

Civil Society Leadership and Industrial Risks: Environmental Justice in Durban, South Africa

This paper examines the ability of civil society leaders in Durban, South Africa to champion environmental justice in an industrial risk society. It presents viewpoints from key social actors at the Durban city level, including three local case sites, to examine civil society leadership capacity to achieve environmental justice by addressing grassroots concerns. It explores how leaders engage with other civil society actors and subsequent responses towards government and industry. The paper compares the urban regional and case studies analyses and highlights that although post-apartheid civil society leadership is not built from the anti-apartheid leadership, changed civil society leadership during the transition has influenced contemporary leadership in Durban, addressing industrial risks. New opportunities and challenges have resulted in the emergence of limited leaders championing industrial risks such as individualized leaders hindering wider collective actions against risks, including engagement in formal technical processes as opposed to mobilizing people. Not only is new and collective interest in civil society leaders required to mediate between classes, communities and the state and capital, but leaders also need to strategically combine the social and industrial pollution issues for solidarity in order to achieve environmental justice.

TRANSFORMATIVE CONSTITUTIONALISM: SEPARATE BUT EQUAL? A SCEPTICAL APPROACH

A rather curious case resurfaces regarding a post-liberal reading of the Constitution, where the majority of the Constitutional Court (I would most humbly contend) failed to apply the correct reading of the Constitution and created a backdoor for the legislature to formally discriminate against a category of persons. What case would my bleeding liberal hart then, as a friend often so kindly phrases it, be aggrieved about? The one atop the shrine of annoyance to many religious and more conservative members of our post-apartheid society: Minister of Home Affairs v Fourie I believe the lone dissenter in the matter, former Justice O’Regan, applied the correct reading of section 39(2) of the Constitution by using the so-called principle of ‘reading in’ to create a gender-neutral definition of marriage in the Constitution. Section 39(2) of the Constitution requires a court to promote the ‘spirit, purport and objects’ of the Bill of Rights when interpreting legislation or developing the common law. Former Justice O’Regan was in lone dissent regarding the appropriate remedy pertaining to the unconstitutionality of the definition of marriage in the Marriage Act. She would have had the order with immediate effect and alter the common law definition of marriage, traditionally being the lifelong union of one man and one woman to the exclusion of all others while it lasts, be gender neutral by utilising the so-called principle of ‘reading in’. Instead, the majority of the court gave the legislature time to correct the definition of marriage, and formally discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender persons. The legislature enacted the Civil Union Act. Under the Civil Union Act, spouses can elect to have their union known as a marriage or a civil union. I employ the phrase ‘formally discriminate’, because for the most part the Civil Union Act brings about the same consequences as the Marriage Act. There however seems to lurk some sense of inferiority in the air about a civil union. Generally, albeit a somewhat anecdotal claim (but has nonetheless become a finding of fact in American law), society does not regard a civil union as a marriage. The question arising can be concisely formulated as follows: although a civil union can be registered as a marriage under section 12(3) of the Civil Union Act, does such registration give rise to the same cultural and traditional symbolic values associated with that of marriage?

‘A world in creolization’: Inheritance politics and the ambiguities of a ‘very modern tradition’ in two Black South African TV dramas

From the early 1990s, the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) emphasized social engineering policies such as nation building and neo-liberalist policies in their programming that were in line with South Africa's new political economy. Through a study of two South African drama series, Ifa LakwaMthethwa and Hlala Kwabafileyo, this article will demonstrate how these films drew from the neo-liberal policies and popular culture discourses germane to contemporary creolized cultural processes to construct ‘aspirational’ narratives (as defined by Vundla and McCarthy, producers of Generations and Gaz' Lam II respectively), that reflect changing economic patterns in post-apartheid African society. Furthermore, the article will demonstrate how these films highlight notions of contemporeinity brought about by the interplay between tradition and modernity, the international world system and the local, and the flow of metropolitan meaning through national culture right up to that of the most remote backwater villages. The change underpinned by the thematic frontiers of these films is read against the traditional cultural frames of inheritance convention, which in both filmic narratives are signalled by the pivotal use of the genres from the oral/popular discourse.

The Treatment Action Campaign and the Three Dimensions of Lawyering: Reflections from the Rainbow Nation

The Treatment Action Campaign’s (TAC) activism over the past decade within post-apartheid South African society has served as a successful example of the promotion of social change in order to combat the HIV epidemic. In this paper, I analyze TAC’s advocacy methods in light of Lucie White’s three dimensions of lawyering and advocate that TAC has fulfilled all three dimensions in promoting a new form of participatory citizenship centred on grassroots activism and self-empowerment.

South African Public Libraries After Apartheid

One of the challenges a postcolonial society has to face is reconciliation, the righting of wrongs and forgiveness. In South Africa, this includes the integration of all ethnic groups into every part of society. Public libraries are one such part of society. This paper studies the changes that have been going on in South African public libraries since the end of Apartheid. The paper also explores how public libraries can play a role in the preservation of all South African cultures, with a view to the future and the essential role of public libraries in the post-Apartheid society.

Miscegenation, Desire and Rape: The Shifting Ground of Disgrace

Summary I discuss three novels that draw on different forms of sexual contact across the colour line, namely Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer ([1926]1976), Alan Paton's (1953) Too Late the Phalarope and Disgrace by J.M. Coetzee (1999). These novels respectively explore miscegenation, interracial sex, and interracial rape. What unites these narratives is their anatomisation of the response in white society to such sexual encounter, crucially indicting sexual contact as a social trope that defines relationships of power. Despite its recurrence, the trope is nonetheless responsive to societal change. An obvious and yet significant difference is that in the postapartheid society represented in Disgrace, interracial sex is not forbidden. I argue that the convention of interracial sexual contact within white South African writing is structured around the signifier “transgression”, and that J.M. Coetzee retains this signifier as a point of reference within the trope, by shifting its overt content from interracial desire to interracial rape. I further consider the formal duplicity of Disgrace, whereby racialised discourse embedded in the realist facet of the narrative is not erased or subsumed by its metafictional properties.

How post-apartheid children express their identity as R citizens D

Children in South Africa are educated to identify with democratic values and democracy in post-apartheid society. As yet, we have no empirical evidence on their views on and identification with the new South African democracy. When given an opportunity to express their life experiences, the 9-year-old child citizens of this case study revealed their democratic identity on various levels. These children expressed a weak identification with democracy on the local level but a strong identification with democracy on the national level. The authors argue that the weak identification on the local level may influence the children’s identification with democracy negatively. It is the key finding of this study that a lack of democratic identification may endanger the sustainability of the South African democracy into the future.

A Paradox of Integration? Interracial Contact, Prejudice Reduction, and Perceptions of Racial Discrimination

A random digit dialing survey (N = 596) investigated the relationship between quantity and quality of interracial contact and Black South Africans’ perceptions of racial discrimination in postapartheid society. Results showed that harmonious contact was associated with lower levels of perceived collective discrimination, an effect that was mediated by racial attitudes and personal experiences of racial discrimination. The implications of the survey's findings are discussed in relation to two models of social change in social psychology (cf. Wright & Lubensky, 2008): a model of change grounded in the rehabilitation of the prejudiced individual and a model of social change grounded in collective awareness of, and resistance to, systemic inequality.

‘I'll Give You Something to Cry About’: The Intraracial Violence of Uplift Feminism in the Carnegie Poor White Study Volume, The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family

ABSTRACT Feminist literary critics and historians have examined the role of a triad of social locations that are also recognisable as psychological conditions, structures of feeling and motivations for action: guilt, innocence and culpability. Feminist literary critics and historians have examined this triad guilt/innocence/culpability in cultural representations of white femininity in the post-apartheid era, because they are trying to write white women into the history of apartheid not simply as zombified non-actors. The attention to white women as perpetrators of anti-black and other forms of racialised violence has been critical for excavating the many forms of domination that constituted apartheid in the period prior to 1994 and in the political project of re-making a post-apartheid society. Thus, they wish to place white women into the history of apartheid as perpetrators of anti-black violence. I am concerned with this, but also with white women as perpetrators of racialised anti-white violence, because intra-racial violence is so intimately connected to the creation of inter-racial violence and the maintenance of white supremacy. Thus, while white women's pursuit of status as caretakers and social guides for blacks has been unmasked as a feature of domination and white supremacy, white women's relationships to poor white women have not been critiqued with the same robustness. This article utilises Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's (1875–1975) volume for The Poor White Study on The Mother and Daughter of the Poor Family (1932) to consider this subject in the vignettes, oral histories and life histories collected for inclusion in the Poor White Study, and in order to urge greater attention to the Poor White Study as a data set for re-thinking guilt, innocence and culpability. I discuss the race, class and gender dynamics of the racialisation of poverty among poor whites, because poor whites were an essential racial formation in the manufacture of Afrikaner nationalism as a gendered national project, and because the institutions and practices of rehabilitation of poor whites participated in a colonial logic of demonisation. I argue that Marie Elizabeth Rothmann's report for the Poor White study provides a cartography of how the history of philanthropy and welfarism bound poor white women and upper-class white women together in a dynamic of intra-racial violence which profoundly illuminates theories about white female guilt and culpability.

Family 2: An Afrikaans Vrou’s [Woman’s] Perspective on Deaf Education in South Africa—A Child’s Perspective

Family 2: An Afrikaans Vrou’s [Woman’s] Perspective on Deaf Education in South Africa—A Child’s Perspective Susanna Krige-Henderson (bio) As a ninth-generation South African, I am proud not only of my heritage but also of being the first Deaf member of my family. As with so many families, the cause of my deafness is unknown. My father was a medical doctor and missionary in Nkhoma, Malawi, when I was born. Over the next few years, my mother and I made numerous [End Page 509] trips from that country back to the Carel du Toit Center in Western Cape Province, since services for Deaf people in Malawi were nonexistent. I received oral training at Carel du Toit, a school designed for Deaf children, which was, at that time, of little benefit to me. Shortly thereafter, my parents decided to enroll me at the De La Bat School, which had a strong penchant for signing, in Worcester, in Western Cape—which was, in my opinion, a wise decision. Fortunately, my family had moved back to Stellenbosch, also located in Western Cape. My mother was strongly devoted to me and made the 1-hour daily commute to and from Worcester every Monday through Friday for my first year at De La Bat, a good hour and a half away. When I was 12 years old, my father found a job that enabled him to relocate the entire family to Worcester. I want to emphasize that most families in South Africa do not have the means to offer what my family was able to provide me—the obstacles are simply too great for most. There was no doubt that my parents wanted the best for me, and through many battles and triumphs, I then went on to complete the 12th grade and subsequently receive a double major in mathematics and education at Gallaudet University in the United States. I am about to finish my graduate degree in deaf education at McDaniel College (formerly known as Western Maryland College), and recently married a Deaf clinical psychologist who now works as a coordinator for a program at Gallaudet. In fall 2010 I began an internship at the Model Secondary School for the Deaf, which is adjacent to the Gallaudet campus in Washington, DC. Although I am blessed and privileged as a Deaf person from a developing country, I feel that I have a responsibility to speak the truth about what it is like to be a Deaf South African. Like many of my peers, I have found that the challenges of Deaf education in South Africa run far deeper than postapartheid society may reveal. I learned the extent of these challenges when I came to America to extend my education, which was not possible in South Africa due to a lack of professional interpreters and other auxiliary services at the university level. For example, the educational system in South Africa is quite complicated by American standards. In South Africa, the majority of Deaf students who go on to finish high school receive NI, N2, N3, N4, and N5 levels of education, which do not qualify one for admission to a university. (The different N levels indicate different levels of training and certification in vocational education.) I was fortunate to be given four HG (higher-grade advanced honor classes) and two SG (standard grade) courses only after my mother fought with the school board to make this an option. This should not be an issue for those who are Deaf and want to advance their position so as to be able to enroll in a university. Once again the issue of choice is the challenge for Deaf learners. This point leads to a second critical area that must be recognized—accessibility of Deaf persons whose primary means of communication is South African Sign Language (SASL). When I was being interviewed by universities in Western Cape, none had the ability to accommodate my needs, which in the United States would be a direct violation of the Americans With Disabilities Act. There is a widespread belief that requirements of this sort exist in South Africa; yet they are hardly enforced, let alone monitored. I...

Xenophobia in South Africa: What Does it Say about Trust?

In May 2008 South Africans made international headlines by embarking on a hitherto unprecedented campaign of violence against African migrants. This violence formed part of a wider pattern of intolerance and antagonism against African migrants in post-Apartheid South Africa. At the heart of this prejudice lies socio-economic deprivation, whilst the political context within which the attacks took place could explain its timing. Much of the work on South African xenophobia takes a citizenship approach, examining processes of nationhood, or focuses on post-Apartheid immigration policy. This paper contributes to the study of xenophobia in South Africa by analysing it in relation to social capital, which emphasises trust as crucial for social development. This article asks what xenophobia suggests about levels of trust in South Africa and argues that the events of May 2008 exposed the distrust—particularly amongst black Africans—that permeates post-Apartheid society. It starts by charting the recent development and causes of xenophobia in South Africa, its significance for trust and social capital, and finally proposes strategies for increasing trust between groups in the context of xenophobia.

An ethics of forgiveness

This article investigates the argument that the Christian idea of forgiveness can and should be translated into a socio-political context, from a Reformed perspective. It furthermore endeavours to provide guidelines that can be applied in the sphere of a political transition of the basis of an ethics of forgiveness. The new post-Apartheid society of South Africa is a good example of such a political transition. The central theoretical argument of this investigation is that the Christian theological perspective of forgiveness can indeed be translated into a socio-political praxis. Seen within the context of major biblical themes, this can provide a valuable, if not indispensable, contribution to the quest for reconciliation and nation-building in countries troubled by histories of colonialism, ethnocentrism, tribalism, racism and xenophobia.