Race In South Africa Research Articles

Embracing Racial Reasoning: The DASO Poster Controversy and ‘Race’ Politics in Contemporary South Africa

We examine the response to a poster published by South Africa's official opposition's youth wing, the Democratic Alliance's Student Organisation (DASO) as part of a political campaign in 2012. From commentary that the poster's publication generated, we excavate some of the key discursive strategies used by commentators to negotiate the gulf between the constitutional value of non-racialism and the lived contemporary reality of race in South Africa. Many commentators situated themselves either as ‘colour-blind’, or reformulated ‘race’ as ‘class’ or ‘culture’. In making visible some of these strategies, and the attendant (re-)racialised narratives upon which they rely, we highlight the paradoxes that inhere in the idea of ‘non-racialism’ – a notion that implies that race must simultaneously be thought and ‘un-thought’. Racial categories contrived by apartheid have been somewhat rearranged and rearticulated, but nevertheless continue to operate today as organising principles.

Reading Olive Schreiner Reading W. E. B. Du Bois

In October 1905, the South African novelist Olive Schreiner received a copy of W. E. B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk. Schreiner, whose thinking about race in South Africa had been developing considerably since the landmark publication of The Story of an African Farm (1883), found herself deeply moved by Du Bois’s book. In a letter to her friend Edward Carpenter she wrote that, “the book makes me feel so much that sometimes I can’t look at it; it seems to come from within me.” In the first decade of the twentieth century, whose central political issue Du Bois had predicted would be “the problem of the color line,” Schreiner found Du Bois’s formulations startlingly apt as she attempted to come to terms with the particular racial crisis South Africa confronted between the end of the South African War (1899–1902) and the formation of the Union of South Africa (1910). Both in content and style, Souls resonated deeply with Schreiner as she wrestled with the “native question” in pre-Union South Africa. Very little notice has been taken of Schreiner’s reading of Du Bois, however, even though her transnational, transracial identification exemplifies the kind of crossnational anticolonial interdiscursivity that Elleke Boehmer and other critics have drawn attention to over the last decade or so. This essay first suggests reasons for the lack of attention to the Schreiner-Du Bois connection and then goes on to analyze the connection’s significance in relation to the com plex discourses of race, class, gender, and nationality and their intersections with systems of imperialism, capitalism, and modernity at the beginning of the twentieth century.

FIFA and the South Africa question: The 1976/1977 football unity talks and their impact on the development of professional football in South Africa

The football unity talks which formally began in October 1976 were important because sport was integral to the debate about the national question in South Africa. At the time, football as a sport code was designated in negative and racist undertones as a ‘sport for blacks’ and rugby, golf, athletics, hockey, cricket and swimming were regarded as sporting codes reserved for white South Africans. These sports benefited immensely in terms of generous funding, infrastructure and facilities provided by the apartheid regime. This paper will be based on the following themes. First, it will focus on the broad legislative measures which reinforced separate development and racism in South Africa and how these laws impacted on the development of sport. Second, it will scrutinize the role of the multilateral, worldwide antiapartheid movement and boycott movement, Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) and the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in using football sanctions as a tool to fight apartheid and racism in sport. Third, the football unity talks of 1976 will be analysed. This discussion will focus on issues inside the boardroom, the football field and what took place outside the boardroom and off the football field. Lastly, the impact of the unity on the players and the public at large-including the development of professional football since 1976 will be reviewed. A major theme which runs through the different sections is defined by the use and abuse of football as a tool for public and sport diplomacy. This was because the football unity talks in South Africa were as a result of what was taking place in the world of international, continental, national and local politics.

The equality of believers: Protestant missionaries and the racial politics of South Africa

From the beginning of the nineteenth century through to 1960, Protestant missionaries were the most important intermediaries between South Africa's ruling white minority and its black majority. The Equality of Believers reconfigures the narrative of race in South Africa by exploring the pivotal role played by these missionaries and their teachings in shaping that nation's history. The missionaries articulated a universalist and egalitarian ideology derived from New Testament teachings that rebuked the racial hierarchies endemic to South African society. Yet white settlers, the churches closely tied to them, and even many missionaries evaded or subverted these ideas. In the early years of settlement, the white minority justified its supremacy by equating Christianity with white racial identity. Later, they adopted segregated churches for blacks and whites, followed by segregationist laws blocking blacks' access to prosperity and citizenship--and, eventually, by the ambitious plan of social engineering that was apartheid. Providing historical context reaching back to 1652, Elphick concentrates on the era of industrialisation, segregation, and the beginnings of apartheid in the first half of the twentieth century. The most ambitious work yet from this renowned historian, Elphick's book reveals the deep religious roots of racial ideas and initiatives that have so profoundly shaped the history of South Africa.

Race in South Africa: A hidden transcript turned public? THE PROBLEM OF IDENTIFYING WITH ESTHER / MORDECAI OR HAMAN IN THE BOOK OF ESTHER

Based on two grass roots readings of Esther 9 in terms of violence and power, the author discusses the issue of race, identity and power. His entry point is based on the notions of public and hidden transcripts as developed by James Scott’s book Domination and the arts of resistance. Hidden transcripts (1990). The article explains the current South African public transcript in terms of racialisation, reconciliation and the problematisation of whiteness. It then looks into aspects of identity in the Book of Esther, exploring the problem of reading the Bible in terms of race. It concludes that because the negative use of race constructs the public transcript at the moment, its construction can also be observed in the current Bible reading process at grass roots level. It is a transcript of superiority over those whose existence is moulded along Western cultural lines, the perpetrators of the former regime.

Kopano Matlwa’s Coconut and the Dialectics of Race in South Africa: Interrogating Images of Whiteness and Blackness in Black Literature and Culture

The public outcry against President Jacob Zuma’s labeling of black ownership of pet dogs as fundamentally “unAfrican” in 2012 and the academic debates around Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s proposal in 2011 for a 1% reparative wealth tax on whites is further evidence of the continued necessity of whiteness studies today, despite South Africa’s independence from a racist Afrikaner regime and its movement towards a nonracist society. Yet, the authority, agency, and normative value of whiteness continue to work covertly within an intellectual critique embedded in standardized interrogations of images and imaginations of race and culture. Kopano Matlwa’s popular debut novel, Coconut, is a necessary, self-reflexive commentary on the interdependent nature of racial inquiry. While critics typically read the novel as resoundingly critical of contemporary blackness, they fail to see its simultaneous evocation of the necessarily porous, performative, and continuously evolving character of race and culture generally. This paper acknowledges Matlwa’s concern with a superficial postapartheid blackness, but also argues that Coconut’s complex invocation of black culture exposes the impossibility of imaging and imagining blackness without imaging and imagining whiteness. In the continued satirical fetishization of whiteness, racial essentialism is destabilized and whiteness is positioned as an inevitable mirror on and of blackness. As such, the paper simultaneously questions the efficacy of “whiteness” studies that suggest the possibility of establishing separate and exclusive studies on race and culture.

Orientations to English in post-apartheid schooling

As Voloshinov has famously argued, ‘the word is the most sensitive index of social changes, and what is more, of changes still in the process of growth’ (Voloshinov, 1986: 19). Scrutiny of young people's discourses on language together with their language practices offers us a window into a society in transition, such as present-day South Africa. This article examines the language ideologies and language practices of Black youth attending previously White, now desegregated, suburban schools in South African cities, important spaces for the production of an expanding Black middle class (Soudien, 2004). Due to their resourcing during apartheid (both financial and human) previously White schools are aligned with quality education and perceived as strategic sites for the acquisition and maintenance of a prestige variety of South African English. This article looks at how mainly African girls (15–16 years) position themselves in relation to English, drawing on data collected using ethnographic approaches in four desegregated schools in South African cities: three in Johannesburg, Gauteng and one in Cape Town, Western Cape. The discussion focuses on two significant themes: English and the [re]production of race; and the place of English in young people's linguistic repertoires. My aim is to show how African youth in desegregated schools orient themselves to English and what their language ideologies and language practices might tell us about macro social processes, including the (re)constitution of race in South Africa. Schooling, as Bourdieu points out, is one of the most important sites for social reproduction and is thus also one of the key sites, ‘which imposes the legitimate forms of discourse and the idea that discourse should be recognised if and only if it conforms to the legitimate norms’ (Bourdieu, 1977: 650). However, co-present with processes of reproduction are practices that work to subvert and unsettle dominant discourses. Suburban desegregated schools are thus productive sites for the re-making of cultural practices (including language) and identities.

Queer Desire and the Men of the Nation: Reading Race, Masculinity, and South African National Identity in John Greyson’s Proteus

This article examines John Greyson’s film, Proteus, for the way it figures queer masculinity and race in South Africa’s national historical narrative. The film offers an esthetic rendering of an eighteenth century interracial sodomy trial set on Robben Island. Drawing on contemporary queer theory and recent South African narratives of masculinity that privilege heternormativity and nationalism, this paper argues that the film carves out a space for queer identity within national history where it had previously been denied. The paper traces the way that the film interjects queer narratives into South Africa’s national identity, disrupts the heteronormalization of various sites of national iconography on South Africa’s historical terrain (such as Robben Island), and offers a queer masculinity that resists racial segregation. Moreover, this paper traces the ways that the film has implications for contemporary queer communities within South Africa.

Three Texts and the Moral Economy of Race in South Africa, c.1890–1910

In the years since the Second World War, most attempts at explaining manifestations of racism have hinged on the trope of displacement intrinsic to the concept of “ideology.” What is posited is a historical process in which social groups rationalize their pursuit of advantage by displacing it onto contiguous, justificatory discourses. While gesturing towards the origins of racism in pre-modern, rigidly stratified forms of social organization, such a narrative emphasizes the modernity of the phenomenon as it is generally understood today by construing it as a product of the competition for advantage – power, status, authority, material well-being – in a (world) system which is based on such competition, capitalism.

‘Satan has come to Rietfontein’: Race in South Africa's Satanic Panic

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the apartheid system was falling apart, white South Africa was gripped by a powerful moral panic that played out, often hysterically, in the newspapers and magazines of the time. This Satanism scare revolved around fears of a large-scale conspiracy of evil that mostly involved white youth, and that threatened the spiritual health and even the continued existence of white South Africa. Rape, murder, cannibalism and all manner of atrocities involving virgins, animals and babies were commonly said to be part of Satanist rituals occurring across the country. Satanists, South Africans were told, were everywhere, and were as great a threat to their nation as communists. This article uses contemporary press material to examine three isolated yet related incidents within the scare: the Orso murder trial in 1992, when a teenager and her boyfriend claimed satanic possession as the motivation for the murder of her mother; the case of the ‘Rietfontein slasher’, also in 1992, when a group of white schoolgirls was apparently tormented by a supernatural force; and a single article about the alleged possession of a large number of black students in a school in the Atteridgeville township in 1989. It uses these three episodes to reveal how the Satanism scare was violently racialised, how the possibility of magic was both legally and culturally reserved for whites and how many white South Africans' literal fear of the devil fed into recurrent discursive narratives about black pathology and white responsibility.

Used for ill; used for good: a century of collecting data on race in South Africa

Data on race have been collected in South African censuses for a century. We examine the role played by the census in solidifying race as a social statistic and show that, in contrast to the majority of situations, operational and legislative factors rendered the census largely unimportant as a vehicle for doing this. Since 1994, race has been entirely self-reported and not subject to state reinterpretation. We examine the implications of this for future data collection exercises and caution against reifying race as a predictor of social outcomes in post-apartheid South Africa, and argue for its gradual phasing out.

Framing the Race in South Africa: The Political Origins of Racial-Census Elections by Karen E. Ferree

Framing the Race in South Africa: The Political Origins of Racial-Census Elections <i>by Karen E. Ferree</i>

An Ethnomethodological, Conversation Analytic Approach to Investigating Race in South Africa

ABSTRACT This primarily methodologically oriented article describes how an ethnomethodologically informed, conversation analytic approach can be used to investigate the ways in which racial categories become relevant in ordinary interactions in post-apartheid South Africa. Drawing on descriptions of the data and procedures employed in a broader study of the continuing centrality of race for everyday life in South Africa, the article explicates the central features and assumptions of the approach and its utility in studying the operation of social category systems (or ‘membership categorization devices’) such as race in recorded interactions. This methodological discussion is illustrated by presenting some excerpts from the data on which the broader study was based, thereby demonstrating some of the analytic payoffs of employing this type of approach. Specifically, I briefly describe a generalising practice through which speakers can treat race as relevant, or potentially relevant, for what they are doing. This empirical illustration demonstrates the utility of this approach in exploring how racial categories (and other social categories) may surface in interactions in which they have not been pre-specified as a topic of interest. The approach I describe thus offers insights into the deployment, and hence reproduction, of common-sense knowledge associated with social categories and racial categories in particular, in ordinary episodes of interaction.

Religion as Race, Recognition as Democracy

Apartheid South Africa enacted physical, structural, and symbolic forms of violence on racially marked South Africans, and postapartheid South Africa has enacted ambitious—though also limited—laws, policies, and processes to address past injustices. In this article, the author traces the South African political histories of one self-defined group, the Lemba, to understand how the violence they collectively experienced when the apartheid state did not acknowledge their ethnic existence continues to shape their ideas of the promise of democracy to address all past injustices, including the injustice of nonrecognition. The Lemba are known internationally for their participation in DNA tests that indicated their Jewish ancestry. In media discourses, their racialization as black Jews has obscured their racialization as black South Africans: they are presented as seeking solely to become recognized as Jews. The author demonstrates that they have in fact sought recognition as a distinct African ethnic group from the South African state consistently since the 1950s. Lemba recognition efforts show that the violence of nonrecognition is a feature of South African multicultural democracy in addition to being part of the apartheid past. The author argues that the racialization of religion that positions the Lemba as genetic Jews simplifies and distorts their histories and politics of race in South Africa.

The Effect of Institutional Racism on Student Family Circumstances: A Human Capabilities Perspective

In apartheid South Africa institutional racism was embedded in the practice of rationing resources and power in order to achieve social exclusion through formally legitimated state policies. In this article, Nussbaum's list of human capabilities is used as a framework for analysing and presenting data from student accounts of institutional racism. Social work students at the University of the Western Cape (UWC), South Africa, compiled their own Family-in-Community profiles by responding to questions on various forms of discrimination, which were designed to elicit their reflections on their families' experiences. The human capabilities approach addresses the following question: what, according to students' accounts, did institutional racism allow them to do and be, or prevent them from doing and being? In other words, how did students see themselves and their family members faring in the context of institutional racism? In this article five items on Nussbaum's list of human capabilities are focused upon in order to demonstrate how institutional racism in South Africa affected the lives of the student participants and their families. The students' accounts indicate that the capabilities outlined in Nussbaum's approach were strongly compromised in the case of their families.

HIV and AIDS-related stigma in the context of family support and race in South Africa

Objectives. In this paper, we describe the first phase of a research project designed to quantify the role of race and cultural identity in HIV-related stigma. The ultimate purpose is to develop an intervention that could be implemented in Black and Colored communities in Cape Town, South Africa. Design. The PEN-3 model provided the theoretical basis for this research. A total of 397 Black and Colored participants were recruited from two communities to complete a 16-item multi-part questionnaire that was developed based on focus groups and key informant interviews. A total of 196 questionnaires were administered in Mitchell's Plain and 201 were administered in Gugulethu. Both communities are located approximately 20 km outside the city of Cape Town in an area known as the Cape Flats. Data were collected on individuals' perceptions of stigma in the contexts of the family, healthcare settings, and the community. However, only the family context is explored here. Participants were also asked to identify what they felt should be the most important area of emphasis for researchers in eliminating stigma. Similarities and differences in perceptions between Black and Colored South Africans were examined. Results. Data were compiled on the family support domain of stigma. Though most either disagreed or were neutral, nearly equal numbers of Blacks and Coloreds thought stigma occurred in families. Blacks were also more likely than Coloreds to report experiencing stigma in their families. Both Blacks and Coloreds felt the family should be the most important focus of interventions for eliminating HIV-related stigma. Conclusion. Within the context of the family race, cultural values, and religious and spiritual values all contribute to HIV stigma in South Africa. Interventions should address the role of stigma within families in order to promote better HIV prevention, treatment, and care.

Races to consume: revisiting South Africa's history of race, consumption and the struggle for freedom

In 2007, Smuts Ngonyama, then leading spokesperson for the South African government and the ANC, triggered a public controversy by proclaiming, ‘I didn't join the struggle to be poor’: a frank conjunction of liberation with wealth and what it can buy. For all the vociferous critique of Ngonyama, there are many whose life trajectories seem to underwrite his position. This article reflects on some of the historical antecedents of this version of freedom, arguing for an historically constitutive relationship between the regulation of race in South Africa and the regulation of consumption.

Racist accusations in contemporary South Africa: lessons from studies of witchcraft

By international consensus, racism features as one of the major evils of our time. Unsurprisingly, therefore, no one wants to be branded a racist. There currently seems to be an epidemic of accusations of racism in South Africa, not altogether unlike the witch ‘craze’ of 16th and 17th century Europe. This paper draws on anthropological literature on witchcraft to shed light on racist accusations in contemporary South Africa. Referring to examples from the printed media, it argues that, like witchcraft, racism can, at least in certain senses, be viewed as the ‘personification of evil’, and is invoked as an ‘explanation of misfortune’. Rather than operating as a ‘mechanism for social control’, racist accusations both reflect and exacerbate existing conflicts and tensions. Finally, the paper emphasises that ‘racism’, like ‘race’ is a social construct and proposes further avenues for anthropological research on the topic.

Post-Apartheid Racism in South Africa The Bible, Social Identity and Stereotyping

AbstractThis contribution investigates the interplay between the recent (early 2008) spate of racist-marked events in South Africa and the Bible, starting with the way biblical references featured in subsequent discussions of the events. The use of the Bible and hermeneutics employed seems to be meshed into a broader array of ways in which "new South African" identities are negotiated, together with the tensions and resistance such identity-negotiations encounter (evoke and counter). Such presence of the Bible is further considered in light of the biblical documents' own tendency towards stereotyping in a manner true to first century-convention, with social identity theory providing the contours for discussing social categorisation and stereotyping. The paper is concluded with some deliberations on the intersections of South African racist discourse and biblical stereotyping.

The Five Names of Tatamkhulu Afrika: Africanness, Europeanness, and Islam in a South African Autobiography

currents The Five Names of Tatamkhulu Afrika Africanness, Europeanness, and Islam ina South African Autobiography Gabeba Baderoon Rejecting the"Europeanness" thathis upbringingand his lightskinhadgiven him,TatamkhuluAfrika sought Africanness through Islam,activism,and empathy with otherblacks.ForAfrika,anAfrican identity does not reside in theskinbut isearnedand recognizedbyothers. rChameleon (2005) is theautobiography of theSouth African political activist,poet, and novelist Tatamkhulu Afrika,who was born inCairo in 1920 and died eighty-twoyears later inCape Town. Afrika converted to Islam in the 1960s and classi fiedhimself asMuslim, therebyceding the racialprivilege ofwhiteness under apartheid. Afrika titledhis autobiography after the chameleon, which embodies thediscursive elusiveness of the life recounted in Mr Chameleon.Afrika's autobiography is simultaneously thenarration of a politically engaged lifeand a meditation on thenature of identity. By the timeofhis death in 2002, thepoet Tatamkhulu Afrika's extraordinary lifestoryhad become well known in literary circles in South Africa. In often beautiful prose, Mr Chameleon recounts a narrative that traverses fromEgypt to theBo-kaap, reversing the colonial Cape toCairo sweep up the continent.1 Within a continental range of reference, Mr Chameleon tellsof thehard-earned selfhood of awriterwhose five successive name changes and racial reclassification confounded the certainties of apartheid. Afrika was born inEgypt in 1920 to a Turkish fatherand Egyptian mother, who moved to South Africa when Afrika was two.After thedeath of his parents shortlyafter theirarrival in South Africa, he was raised by family friends as a white child.Afrika foughton theAllied side in theSecond World War and later as part ofUmkhonto we Sizwe (or "Spear of theNation" inZulu, thename of the armed wing of the African National Congress) in the anti-apartheid struggle.After being known asMogamed Fu'ad Nasif, John Charlton, Ismail Joubert,and Tatamkhulu IsmailAfrika,Afrika adopted the lastofhis names, which means "Grandfather ofAfrica" inXhosa, froman honorific titlegiven tohim by fellow soldiers inUm khonto we Sizwe. As part of apartheid's racial project, the idea ofAfricanness itself was denigrated?the Nationalist government advocated a policy of exceptionalism, through which South Africa was cast as separate and qualitatively different from the rest of the continent.However, thename Afrikaner (literally "African") revealed thecontradiction of claiming a purely European identityat theheart of apartheid. It is therefore notable that,inaddition to rejecting theapartheid category ofwhiteness, Tatamkhulu Afrika also insisted on claiming anAfrican identity.In fact, Mr Chameleon embodies theanxiety behind apartheid ("separate ness"), the systemof racial hierarchy thatgoverned SouthAfrica from1948 to 1994,being that whiteness could be indistinguishable from blackness and, moreover, Europeanness could be indistinguishable from Africanness. Gabeba Baderoon received a PhD inEnglish from the University of Cape Town and has heldfellowships at the African Gender Institute, the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies, and the University of Sheffield. She has published widelyon representations of Islam, slavery and the construction of "race" and sex inSouth Africa. Baderoon was the inaugural Humanities Writer inResidence at the University ofWitwatersrand in2008 and isAssistant Professor ofWomen's Studies and African & African American Studies at Pennsylvania State University. 56 i World Literature Today The relation of Europe toAfrica inSouth Africa's racial politics points to the legacy of the colonial era.While Mr Chameleondocuments thebrutal implicationsofapartheid's racial categories,notions of race in apartheid South Africawere based on the meanings of skin color inventedduring thecolonial period, under theDutch from 1652 and, from 1806 onward, under the British. From the seventeenth century, thepopulation of the colonies that would become South Africa consisted ofAfricans, European settlers, I and "Malays," the slaves brought to theCape by Europeans fromEast Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. 0 The category "coloured" came into widespread use at theCape aftertheabolition of slavery in 1834,and| referredtoKhoisan people and freed slaves. As thehistorian Shamil Jeppie and the literaryscholar Zoe 5 Wicomb write, thepossibility of a largerblack collectivityafter the end of slaverywas undermined by p colonial policies that would exacerbate differencesamong blacks and imbue the term"coloured" with the 1 burden of "shame" for itsassociation with miscegenation and African and slave roots.This "shame" of January-February 2009 157 3 slavery led to an erasure in folk memory of such origins and an emphasis on European family con nections instead. Therefore, meanings of Europe anness and Africanness became deeply implicated in conceptions of race inSouth Africa. In the era ofDutch...